Antiamericanismo: When a Commentator Claimed He Wove the Hatred of an Entire Football Nation

In a corner of the stands at Estadio Olímpico Universitario, on an afternoon when the jeers fell like hail, I asked a Mexican friend a very naive question: "Why do you hate América so much?" He looked at me, smiled, and answered plainly: "Because it wins. That's all." I carried that answer with me for years, across stadiums and tournaments. But only when I revisited the story of the man called the "father" of that hatred did I realize something chilling: some hatreds do not grow from the grass, they grow from the microphone. And when a man claims to have sown the seed, an entire football nation is forced to ask what it has been watering it with for nearly fifty years.

In Mexico, football is not merely a sport. It is a system of emotional stratification, in which people line up by class, by education, by region, and finally by shirt colour. At the top of that system stands Club América — described as the most successful team in Mexico, the team of trophies and expensive contracts, the team that few love but many remember. Its counterweight, in the collective memory, is Pumas (Club Universidad Nacional), the team of the national university, carrying the image of the public, of students, of a "purity" that people like to ascribe to the underdog. From that opposition a name was born: antiamericanismo.

One thing must be said at once, because Vietnamese readers can easily misread it. In ordinary Spanish, antiamericanismo means anti-Americanism — hostility toward the United States. But in Mexican football it has been "confiscated" to mean something entirely different: the particular aversion that non-fans feel toward Club América (Las Águilas). This is a pun designed to be memorable, to spread, to become a brand. The name itself is half the media: it packages a complex emotion into a concept that can be named, and what can be named can be shared.

But the story becomes truly remarkable when a man named José Ramón Fernández — a veteran commentator, the face of ESPN Mexico's Futbol Picante and a columnist for Exélsior — publicly claimed that he was the origin. He said that from the 2026/76 season he began deliberately speaking badly about América, and that all of it, in his words, was to create a rivalry with Pumas. This was not a confession behind closed doors. It was a statement on television and in print, repeated by a man holding two major media platforms at once. A hatred of an entire nation, retold as the product of a single editorial decision.

What made me pause was not the shock value of the claim, but the extremely subtle distinction Fernández himself drew. He said he did not hate the team. He said the team is a winner, and has come to play well. What he said he hated was "América's environment" and "the context that the television station gave it." This is the analytical crux, and in my view the most credible part of the whole account. The hatred does not target sporting achievement; it targets the media-power structure standing behind it. When a man says "I hate how it is lit," he is talking about the economics of attention, not about goals.

And this is where I want to place the emphasis, because in my profession I have seen the same thing in many other places around the world. The América in my memory is not a beloved club. It is an organized villain. In the emotional economy of a league, a "common enemy" has enormous value: it unites people who otherwise share nothing, it creates an axis of conversation the whole league can join, and most importantly, it generates viewers. A villain performs better than a neutral team, and Liga MX has a perfect villain in its hands.

But I must be careful, because it is easy to fall into the beautiful trap of the story: one man, one decision, one hatred born. If I wrote it that way, I would have done the easy work of a storyteller rather than the hard work of a journalist. The evidence for the claim "I created it" comes from a single source: the man himself, speaking about himself, on his own platform. That is the weakest evidentiary tier for a causal assertion spanning half a century. No minutes from 2026 confirm that a national hatred was commissioned on that very day.

I ask myself, if I sat in Fernández's chair, whether I would tell the story that way. Our profession teaches us that every hatred needs a narrator. And when a narrator takes on the role of founder, he does not merely tell history — he grants himself a place within it. There is a very subtle self-mythologizing here, and it is not necessarily a lie. It is simply how memory is kneaded by the person holding the microphone.

Because this is what I believe: if a hatred needed only one sower to exist, it would die when he stopped speaking. But antiamericanismo has lived for nearly fifty years, across generations of commentators, club presidents, and transfer cycles. That can only happen if the soil was already fertile beforehand. And what is that soil? The division between a corporate club tied to a large media conglomerate and a public club tied to a university. The story of rich versus poor, of "money versus purity" — a story every football nation has. The media did not create the hatred. The media found it, named it, and sold it.

I once stood in an empty stadium during the pandemic, hearing the ball roll on the grass and the birds on the terraces, and I wrote that football is the voice of human beings. The empty stadium of that year taught me that football is the voice of human beings. But it also taught me the opposite: when the people are gone, all that remains is the context — and that context is precisely what Fernández says he hates. With no fans, no singing, América is still América. What makes the hatred is not the club, but the frame into which people lock it.

There is one small detail I always keep when reading stories like this. Fernández recounts his childhood, naming players he once watched: Moacyr, Ney Blanco, Martell, Pepín González. Those names carry nothing tactical. They are just memory. And that is exactly why they matter: they show that behind every claim to have "woven a hatred" is a child sitting and watching football, learning to love, learning to hate, learning to pin on one shirt colour everything he does not yet understand about the world. The sower was once a seedling.

I think about this whenever I follow derbies anywhere. We usually speak of "head-to-head history" as if history were something natural, like grass growing. But head-to-head history is written, edited, broadcast, and repeated in prime time. It is no more natural than a news bulletin. And when a veteran editor once told me he had been wrong to think women do not understand football, I understood that prejudices are woven the same way: someone says it, someone repeats it, and then a whole generation believes it is truth.

The most frightening thing about antiamericanismo is not the hatred itself. It is that the hatred has become a profitable product. A league with a common enemy sells more tickets, more rights, more shirts. There exists a perverse incentive: sustaining polarization can pay. I am not saying someone sits in a meeting room planning to make people hate each other. I am only saying that no one has an incentive to extinguish it.

And this is the counter-intuitive angle I want to leave behind. We tend to assume that a "staged" hatred is fake and a "natural" one is real. But football does not work that way. Every hatred is staged to some degree — by the media, by the clubs, by the fans themselves who want an excuse to shout louder. What decides the matter is not whether it is staged, but whether it touches a real fracture in society. Antiamericanismo survived nearly half a century not because one commentator was skilled, but because it touched the exact fracture between those with power and those without. Otherwise it would have faded like every other fad.

This leads me to a thought I do not want to end with a summary. If Fernández's claim is true, it is a reminder that what we call "football culture" can be steered by a few people with microphones. If it is false, it is another reminder: that even collective memory can be appropriated by an individual, and that we need more than one source before believing that someone created the hatred of an entire nation. Both possibilities lead to the same question, and I leave it to the reader: when you hate a team, are you hating your own yesterday, or are you hating a frame someone closed around you before you were born?

I once thought football was a place where emotions belong to the fans. After this story, I must add a clause: emotions belong to the fans, but the frame that holds those emotions usually belongs to someone else. And perhaps the task of a writer like me is not to remove that frame, but to show the reader its outline — so they know where they stand, and why they stand there.