Why Liga MX no longer relegates anyone
From 2026–27 the rulebook says it in so many words — Liga MX clubs will not go down, and nobody can come up. How Mexico got from relegation-by-average to a closed league, and how a famous old club came back anyway.
European football's founding promise is that any club can rise and any club can fall. Mexico's top flight has just written the opposite into its regulations.
From the bottom of the table to the bottom of an average
Liga MX never relegated the way England does. It relegated on the cociente — a club's points per match across several seasons — so that one disastrous campaign could not send down a big club. The club with the worst average went down, not the club in last place.
Then the door closed. Promotion and relegation were suspended, and the clubs at the bottom of the cociente table paid for their place instead of losing it: fines of 80, 47 and 33 million pesos for the bottom three.
2026–27: written into the rulebook
The competition regulation published for this season goes a step further. It states that, from the 2026–27 season, the clubs that make up Liga MX will not be relegated to the second tier, Expansión MX, and that clubs in that tier cannot be promoted. The fines have been abolished as well. The cociente table still exists, but for statistical purposes only.
So there is no relegation zone on any Liga MX table on this site. It is not an omission. There is nothing to mark.
What is left to play for
Plenty, as it happens — because Mexico's tournaments are short and end in play-offs.
Each half of the season is a 17-match tournament, and the top eight go straight into the Liguilla quarter-finals. (The play-in round for seventh to tenth place was abolished from this Apertura.) Finishing position then keeps mattering: in the quarter-finals and semi-finals, a tie that finishes level on aggregate is won by the club that finished higher in the table — no extra time, no penalties. Only the final goes the distance.
A closed league is a calmer place to own a club and a less frightening place to be bad. Whether it is a better league to watch is the argument Mexico is now having.
The club that came back without being promoted
If nobody can come up, how is Atlante — a historic club that had been out of the top flight for twelve years — in this season's table?
Not through promotion. Atlante bought the affiliation of Mazatlán FC, and in April 2026 the league made official both Mazatlán's disappearance from Liga MX and Atlante's arrival for the new season. In a closed league, the way in is to buy a place from someone already inside.
You can see it in our data. The 2025–26 results file has Mazatlán and no Atlante; the 2026–27 file has Atlante and no Mazatlán. Mazatlán's page is still here, marked as a former club with its record through last season, because the search index still follows the name. Atlante's page starts in July.
How this looks from Europe
A European reader will reach for the American comparison: franchises, no relegation, play-offs. It is a fair one — with the large difference that Liga MX crowns two champions a season, each after a short sprint and a knockout, which keeps far more clubs in contention far later than a 38-match league does.
For the full mechanics — the Liguilla, the tie-break rule, the calendar — read Apertura and Clausura explained. For what relegation looks like where it still bites, including Argentina's three-season average, see the football pyramid.