Cruz Azul vs. Pumas
The Cement Machine of Mexican football.
Cruz Azul is a Mexican professional football club based in Mexico City, founded in 1927 in Jasso, Hidalgo. The club competes in Liga MX and plays its home matches at Estadio Azteca.
- Cruz Azul founded
- 1926 (September 17, Mexico's Independence Day)
- Pumas UNAM established
- 1944, as the athletic team of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
- Cruz Azul home ground
- Estadio Azul, La Magdalena Contreras (south of Mexico City)
- Pumas home ground
- Estadio Olímpico Universitario, Chapultepec (north of Mexico City)
- Cruz Azul identity
- La Máquina Celeste / Los Cementeros — working-class, industrial, blue-collar
- Pumas identity
- La U / Los Pumas — university, student, intellectual
- Rivalry type
- Intracity derby; class and geographic divide within Mexico City
Lore & Background
Cruz Azul was founded on 22 May 1927 in Jasso, Hidalgo, after a referendum on 22 March 1927 selected football over baseball. The club was originally composed exclusively of company workers from the cement cooperative Cooperativa La Cruz Azul. It relocated to Mexico City in 1971. The club has never been relegated from the top flight and holds the joint-record for most CONCACAF Champions Cup/Champions League titles (seven). It was the first CONCACAF club to reach the Copa Libertadores final and achieved a continental treble in 1968–69, later becoming the first club worldwide to win the continental treble twice.
In Their Own Story
The bus from the plant in the south takes forty minutes to reach the Olímpico, and the whole ride is a slow build. The older guys in the back recite old scores, the young ones chant until their throats go raw, and the blue scarves hang out the windows like flags. You can smell the diesel, the cheap coffee, the sweat of forty men packed into a metal box. Then the gates open and the noise hits you like a wall — the green-and-gold sea of the Pumas stands, the drums, the whistles, the jeers that start before the kickoff. A Pumas fan in the opposite tier spits a slur across the aisle. Your friend shoves him. The ref blows his whistle. The match is already over. The real match is the one in the stands, the one that has been going on since 1926, and nobody is calling a full-time whistle on it tonight.
Reader's Guide
Cruz Azul plays its home matches at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. The club maintains a long-standing rivalry with América, known as the Clásico Joven. According to the source, Cruz Azul is the third-most popular team in Mexico, behind América and Guadalajara, and within the Mexico City metropolitan area it is generally regarded as the second-most supported club, behind América and ahead of Pumas UNAM.
Did You Know?
- Cruz Azul was founded in 1927, not 1926.
- The club holds the joint-record for the most CONCACAF Champions Cup/Champions League titles with seven.
- Cruz Azul is one of only seven Mexican clubs to have never been relegated from the top flight.
- The club achieved a continental treble in 1968–69, becoming the first CONCACAF club and third worldwide to do so.
More in Great Rivalries & Derbies
Elsewhere in the Cruz Azul universe
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