Liga MX 2017

Lore & Background

By the time the 2017 season rolled around, Chivas had already been without a Liga MX title for several years, and the gap between the club's legendary past and its present form had grown into a chasm that the faithful found increasingly difficult to bridge. The all-Mexican policy, once a source of fierce pride and a unique selling point in a league full of foreign imports, had begun to feel less like a badge of honour and more like a structural limitation. The 2017 campaign laid that tension bare: the team could not find the consistency, the tactical cohesion, or the finishing sharpness to compete at the top of a league that had become more physically and tactically demanding.

The atmosphere in the stands at the Estadio Akron (the club's home ground in Zapopan, part of the Guadalajara metro area) shifted through the season. Early optimism gave way to frustration, then to a grim, almost defiant solidarity. The Chivería, known for their legendary travelling support and their unwavering loyalty, did not abandon the team. Instead, they turned the pain into fuel. Chants that had once celebrated titles became anthems of endurance. The 2017 season, in retrospect, is remembered not for any single match but for the collective emotional arc: the slow dawning that the club needed a fundamental reset, both on and off the pitch.

For the broader narrative of Chivas in Mexican and continental football, 2017 sits in the same lineage as other lean years in the club's 120-plus-year history—periods where the Rebaño was expected to be a force and instead became a cautionary tale. Yet the club's identity, forged in the 1906 founding and hardened through decades of rivalry with Club América, proved resilient. The 2017 season did not break Chivas; it tested them. And in the Chivería's telling, that test ultimately fed the hunger that would drive the club toward its next competitive revival.

In Their Own Story

The floodlights hummed to life over a half-empty bowl in Zapopan. It was a Tuesday in November, Apertura 2017, and the scoreboard read 0-0 in the 78th minute. A Chivas midfielder, boots caked in the red clay of the Jalisco soil, stared up at the upper tier where a single banner read: "NO TE VAMOS A OLVIDAR, REBAÑO." He wiped sweat from his brow, felt the weight of 111 years of expectation in his shoulders, and turned back to the centre circle. The crowd was small—too small for a club of this magnitude—but the few thousand voices that filled the night air carried a particular quality: not the roar of a title night, but the low, grinding, unbreakable hum of a people who had decided, long ago, that they would not let go. He took the ball on his chest, looked up the pitch, and played it forward. The season would end in silence. But the silence, he knew, was not the end. It was the breath before the next song.

Reader's Guide

There is no trophy to pair with 2017, and any honest Chivería will tell you that. The "record" of this season is the absence: no Liguilla, no continental qualification, no silverware. What it does record is the depth of the drought and the cost of expectation.

In Apertura 2017, Chivas finished in the lower half of the table, well below the playoff cutoff. In Clausura 2017, the pattern repeated. The decisive "match" of the season was not a single fixture but the accumulation of draws and losses that slowly bled the team out of contention. For a club that had won 12 Liga MX titles by that point and carried the unique all-Mexican identity, finishing without a playoff berth in two consecutive tournaments was a statement that the old formula—raw talent, national pride, home-crowd energy—was no longer sufficient in a league that had evolved tactically and physically.

What the season says about Chivas's standing is uncomfortable but necessary: the club was no longer the automatic favourite it had been in the 1980s and 1990s. The rivalry with América, once a war of equals, had tilted. The continental stage, where Chivas had once been a regular presence, felt distant. Yet the 2017 season also crystallised something: the Chivería's refusal to let the club's identity be defined by a single poor year. The all-Mexican policy, the red-and-white colours, the 1906 founding—these did not change. What changed was the standard of performance the world expected, and the club's need to meet it.

Did You Know?

• Chivas is the only club in Liga MX history to field an exclusively Mexican-born squad, a policy that dates back to the club's founding era and remained in place throughout the 2017 season and beyond.
• The 2017 season was part of a multi-year title drought; the club had not won the Liga MX championship in several years prior to 2017, a gap that intensified the pressure on every match.
• The Chivería's travelling support is legendary in Mexican football; even in a season of poor results, away-end sections at rival grounds remained a visible, vocal presence, a testament to the fanbase's loyalty.
• Chivas's home ground in the Guadalajara metro area has undergone several name changes over the years (Tres de Marzo, Omnilife, Akron), but the red-and-white identity of the stadium experience has remained constant since