Who was the first team to beat the Mexican national side at the Azteca?
The answer, which will probably come as a surprise to most people, is Tottenham Hotspur!
As part of a mammoth tour during the summer of 1966, we visited Mexico for the first time in our history. Having already played friendly matches on the trip in Bermuda, Toronto, Hartford, New Jersey, San Francisco and Vancouver, we arrived in Mexico City to play two further matches, originally billed as being against ‘local opposition’.
However, our first friendly on 12 June ended up being against the Mexican national team which was due to leave for the 1966 World Cup in England the following day - and the Azteca Stadium was the venue.
Not that the iconic arena had the aura surrounding it which will greet England on Sunday afternoon, local time (kick-off is 1am Monday morning in the UK).
With work having started in 1961, the vast stadium only opened just a few weeks before our visit with an inaugural match on 29 May between reigning Mexican champions Club America and Italian side Torino, which finished 2-2. Four further club matches were staged there over the next couple of weeks before Mexico played their first-ever game at the Azteca, with Tottenham Hotspur their opponents.
This was no normal pre-season friendly though. Football fever was at its peak as the World Cup approached and the Mexican fans packed out their new home to give their heroes a passionate send-off ahead of their departure to England. It’s estimated that a crowd of around 100,000 was in attendance.
They didn’t get the World Cup warm-up win they had hoped for though!
Spurs shrugged off the much-discussed altitude issues – the Azteca Stadium is around 2,240 metres above sea level – to produce an excellent performance with Alan Gilzean applying the final touch to a swift counter-attack with 10 minutes to go to score the only goal of the game.
The Mexican newspaper shown below – whose headline reads ‘Team Mexico Defeated by Tottenham’ – shows Mexico’s Enrique Borja heading a cross from Aaron Padilla just wide as a host of our players including Phil Beal, Cyril Knowles and Pat Jennings look on anxiously!
The two teams were:
Mexico: Calderón, Chaires, Peña, Núñez, Hernández, Díaz, Mercado, Reyes, Jara, Fragoso (Borja), Padilla.
Spurs: Jennings, Beal, Knowles, Mullery, L Brown, Mackay, Weller (Gilzean), Clayton (Henry), Saul, Venables, Robertson (Possee).
At the time, the result was considered a solid win against good opposition but, in hindsight, it was a remarkable victory.
Over the course of the next 60 years, right up to the present day, the Azteca has become one of the genuine fortresses in world football. Mexico’s national team have only lost 11 of almost 90 matches at the ‘Colossus of Santa Ursula’ – as the venue is nicknamed locally – and just two of those were in competitive matches. El Tri’s last defeat there was a 2-1 World Cup qualifying loss to Honduras in September 2013.
Just to prove our win was no fluke, three days after beating Mexico we were back at the Azteca for a friendly against Club America and this time enjoyed a 2-0 victory thanks to goals from Keith Weller and Gilzean, both headers from corners.
We then left Mexico City to continue our summer tour with two games against Bayern Munich in Detroit and Chicago before heading home to north London, having played a staggering 11 matches in a month!
That wasn’t the end of the relationship with our Mexican friends, however. Drawn in Group 1 for the 1966 World Cup alongside England, France and Uruguay, Mexico based themselves in London with all three of their group matches taking place at Wembley Stadium.
On arrival in the capital, they were given Finchley FC’s ground for training purposes but were unimpressed with the hard and bumpy pitch and were forced to find more suitable facilities. Spurs came to the rescue as we offered them our Cheshunt training ground and the indoor facility at White Hart Lane to use instead. Mexico finished third in the group, drawing with France and Uruguay but losing to England, and failed to make the knockout stages.
One final interesting note to our Azteca connections involves the great Pat Jennings. Having featured against Mexico in that 1966 fixture on his 21st birthday in the early stages of his time at Spurs, exactly 20 years later to the day, he was back in action at the iconic venue!
This time it was with Northern Ireland, as Big Pat played his 119th and final match for his country in a group match against Brazil at the 1986 World Cup.