The sporting-president chair at Juárez: whoever sits down will set the rhythm of the whole season

The FC Juárez statement runs exactly four lines. No photograph, no words from the owner, no thank-you. In Ciudad Juárez, the city pressed against the bridge to El Paso, where daily life follows factory shifts and truck convoys through the customs gate, supporters are used to administrative notices of that kind. What matters is inside the text: the club confirms it is looking for a successor to Andrés Fassi in the sporting-president role.

Before that, RÉCORD, citing collaborator Juan Carlos Ibarrarán, reported that the Juárez board had opened talks with Ramón Planes, an executive who has accumulated experience across several different sporting structures in Europe. The name has been floated, the job title has not been settled, and the league table is saying the rest: eight rounds, not a single point.

I sat down to rewatch a few of their matches, looking for something worth saying about how they play. There is nothing to say. The material is insufficient to draw conclusions about the system, the pressing scheme, the shape of the squad. And that very gap is the most important fact in this story.

A results crisis is being handled by changing the governance architecture, not by changing the way the team plays. Anyone who has followed Mexican football long enough recognises the pattern: when results collapse, seats get swapped in the boardroom before formations get swapped on the pitch.

Context: a league with no room for patience

Liga MX runs on two short tournaments a year, Apertura and Clausura. Eighteen clubs, an expanded knockout stage that includes a play-in branch for the teams just outside the top places, and a promotion and relegation mechanism suspended since 2026. The structural consequence is plain to everyone and rarely stated outright: with relegation fear removed, the only remaining yardstick for a season is league position and a playoff berth. Every long-term project is squeezed into a four-month frame.

Juárez is the clearest illustration of that paradox. Promoted in 2026, playing at the Estadio Olímpico Benito Juárez, representing an industrial border city with a loyal but far less resourced fanbase than the giants in Monterrey, Guadalajara or Mexico City. To compete inside a four-month window, they must choose between two paths: buying immediate results, or building a structure solid enough to survive bad seasons.

Everyone knows the sporting-president title in Mexico carries broader meaning than the sporting-director title in Europe. At many clubs, the person in that chair is a direct representative of the ownership, wielding authority above the head coach, signing transfers, and in some cases intervening in the matchday squad list itself. When an executive who has worked inside European structures is linked to that chair, the first question I ask myself is not how good he is, but what his contract says he is allowed to do.

I keep a habit of recording appointments of this kind by hand. The German knocked once, and I opened an entire archive of scouting files never made public. Precisely because I have opened that archive, I know most files speak clearly about an executive's record at a previous club and stay entirely silent about the scope of his authority at the new one. That silence is where success or failure is decided.

In the currently public material about the Juárez case, several things have not appeared and I will not fill the gaps myself: no information on the contract length offered, no reporting line, no statement from the ownership clarifying who holds final responsibility for transfers, and no financial figures released. For someone whose job is guarding data, stating clearly what is unknown carries the same value as stating clearly what is known. The dressing room whispers; my job is to record it from memory, not from a machine.

Analysis: the three powers that decide the fate of the chair

When a club imports the continental sporting-director model, that model only functions if the ownership hands over three specific groups of powers. Without those three, the chair is nothing more than a title to pin blame on.

The first is the power of the transfer pen. The person in the chair must control player files, define recruitment criteria, and be able to reject deals pushed in from outside. In Liga MX that pressure is considerable: sponsors, agents close to the ownership, and local media all have channels for putting a name on the table. If the sporting president cannot say no, the new structure is only a coat of paint.

The second is the power to appoint the head coach. This is the sharpest dividing line between the European model and the reality most clubs in the region operate under. In the standard model, the sporting director selects a coach who fits an already-defined philosophy, rather than receiving a coach handed down by the board and being told to adapt. If Juárez lets the new sporting president choose the man on the bench, they have a project. If not, they have two bosses in one building.

The third is discussed least but decides day-to-day quality: control of the medical department, sports science and scouting. This is where I have the most direct experience after years embedded with clubs in the V.League. Based on my experience watching matches and training sessions, most performance crises in Southeast Asian leagues do not begin with tactics. They begin with a player sent on when not physically ready, an injury diagnosed three weeks late, a scouting report copied from a highlight reel instead of built from quantitative data.

The story of the German scout I have told before still stands as a foundational lesson. He watched one match, saw a Vietnamese player booked and anonymous, immediately concluded that top speed was 27 km/h, below the European standard, and cancelled a transfer worth 1.8 million euros. The GPS equipment at the stadium that day was faulty. The real top speed was 33 km/h. I wrote the piece exposing that carelessness; it reached 1.2 million reads. Since then I have never written a conclusion without cross-checking at least two data sources. Digitisation did not make me faster, but it forces me to be more honest with every line of data.

Apply that principle to Juárez: eight matches without a point is outcome data, not process data. It tells you the team lost; it does not tell you why. No expected goals, no pressing metrics, no possession share appears in the source material, so any statement along the lines of this team defends deep and counters or dominates the ball is speculation. Professionals ought to say so plainly rather than filling the gap with a confident tone.

What the source material does reveal belongs to architecture. A club searching for someone with experience across several European sporting structures is signalling that it wants to move the definition of its playing identity above the coaching bench. In that model, the recruitment profile, the physical criteria and even the choice of coach are all defined at a higher layer. Done properly, after three or four transfer windows the club has a stable playing direction that reacts less to individual matches. Done badly, it creates a two-headed conflict between sporting president and head coach, and the players always pay.

Timing makes everything harder. The executive change comes after the bench change, mid-tournament. The current squad was assembled under the outgoing policy. If the new sporting president selects a different head coach, that would be the second bench change of the same season, accompanied by a squad reconstruction inside a transfer window. The cost is not the compensation package; it sits in squad value: players bought for the old system lose value, players suited to the new system are bought from a weak negotiating position, and the young-player minutes required under current Liga MX rules are spent on men who are not part of the long-term plan.

There is one further layer I always want in the piece, even when it is absent from the original report: the relationship between the analytics department and the dressing room. In recent years data analysts have moved deep inside the internal space of clubs. They arrive with dashboards, models and probabilities. Many of their conclusions are statistically correct yet out of step with the actual rhythm of a group that is tired, losing belief, carrying a captain who has just been through something at home. A good sporting president is someone who can set the spreadsheet on the table and still hear the rhythm of the dressing room. When technology changed how football tells its stories, I simply changed how I listen.

In the V.League I once shadowed a club for 250 days in a single season, attending 34 training sessions and 18 away matches. A young player wearing number 29 scored seven goals and was ignored by supporters in online polls. I set up a survey myself on the fan page, drawing 12,000 interactions, to understand why that indifference existed. The result showed that the community did not trust the coaching staff's tactics, even though the team was on a five-match winning run. That taught me that terrace belief operates on its own logic, independent of the table. An executive appointment, however sound professionally, can still be read as window dressing if the club cannot explain who is accountable for what.

The contrarian angle: the public is arguing about the wrong thing

Most of the debate revolves around names. Ramón Planes or another candidate, the man with the European CV or the man who knows Mexican football better. That framing is comfortable for everyone involved and useless to the club. In Liga MX, the sporting-president chair is often erected as a lightning rod for the ownership: it exists to absorb criticism, and is only given real authority when the owners are ready to be accountable in public.

One thing rarely touched by regional media deserves saying plainly. Attention paid to an appointment in the top division dwarfs attention paid to the system beneath it, where Liga de Expansión clubs are starved of resources and no longer have a clear path to promotion. Fairytales from the lower tiers are consumed and discarded whenever a big matchday comes around. Genuine reform of how resources are distributed never arrives. A new chair at Juárez does not change that reality, and I will not write as though it does.

My last point is perhaps the one that irritates me most as an observer: the European model is being used as an automatic answer. Importing a continental executive does not automatically create a playing identity, does not automatically fix a squad short on depth, and does not automatically convince a dressing room that has lost belief. It opens one possibility: that decisions about people will be taken by someone whose professional record makes him accountable, rather than by an unnamed group of interests. That possibility is worth tracking. It is not worth calling a solution.

I hold to my old view about how clubs handle crises. Most of them write about the comeback before admitting the damage, and the result is that nobody learns anything from the fall. With Juárez, the damage should be written first: eight matches without a point, a season that has already slipped close to out of reach, eroded belief in a border city. Only then comes the restructuring story. Reverse the order and every article becomes advertising.

What would show that this chair carries real power

The next internal signal lies in the job title inside the published document. If the club uses sporting president alongside a specific description of transfer and coaching-appointment authority, that is a project. If the title appears only in a one-line announcement with a thank-you, it is decoration.

The second signal lies in the order of announcements. We will see who is announced first, the sporting president or the head coach. That order tells you who is really choosing whom.

The third signal lies in the coming transfer window: whether the player files brought in follow one consistent criteria or are simply short-term contracts to put out fires. And the final signal lies outside the boardroom, on the terraces of Ciudad Juárez. The stands may be empty, but the heartbeat of a community never stops. When supporters in this border city start naming the person accountable instead of naming the coach, that is when the new structure has truly begun to operate.