Apertura and Clausura explained: how Liga MX crowns two champions a season
Liga MX does not play one long season. It plays two short tournaments, each with its own table, its own play-offs and its own champion — and, from 2026–27, no relegation at all.
If you grew up on European football, the first thing to unlearn about Mexico is the idea of the league table. There are two a season, and each one ends with a trophy.
Two tournaments, not two halves
A Liga MX season is split into the Apertura ("opening") and the Clausura ("closing"). They are not the first and second halves of one competition: points do not carry over, and each tournament has its own champion. A club can win the Apertura and finish bottom of the Clausura, and both facts stand.
Each tournament has two parts:
- A regular season of 17 matches. Liga MX has 18 clubs, and each plays every other club once — a single round-robin, not home and away.
- The Liguilla — the play-offs that decide the champion.
The Apertura is played in the second half of the calendar year and the Clausura in the first half of the next: the Apertura 2026 kicked off on 17 July, and its final is played over two legs in December.
The Liguilla
The top eight clubs in the table go straight into the quarter-finals, seeded by their finishing position: first plays eighth, second plays seventh, third plays sixth and fourth plays fifth.
That is new. Until recently the league also ran a play-in round for the clubs placed seventh to tenth; its clubs' assembly abolished the play-in permanently from the Apertura 2026. If you are reading an older table on this site, it carries a mark against every club that actually played in that tournament's Liguilla rather than this season's top-eight line.
Every round of the Liguilla, including the final, is played over two legs, one at each club's ground. What happens when the aggregate score is level is the part that surprises people:
| Round | Level on aggregate? |
|---|---|
| Quarter-finals and semi-finals | The club that finished higher in the table goes through. No away goals, no extra time, no penalties. |
| Final | Table position counts for nothing. Two 15-minute periods of extra time, then penalties. |
So the regular season is never meaningless: finishing second rather than seventh is worth a draw over two legs. You can see the rule at work on this site — in the Clausura 2026, three of the six quarter- and semi-final ties finished level and the higher seed advanced each time.
Level on points
Clubs level on points in the table are separated first by goal difference and then by goals scored. Every source agrees on those two. Beyond them the published accounts of the 2026–27 regulation disagree about the order of away goals, head-to-head results and fair play, and the league's own regulation file would not open for us — so this site computes the first two steps and says so under the table, rather than guess at the rest.
No relegation — and what the cociente was
For years Mexico did not relegate the club that finished bottom. It relegated the club with the worst cociente: points per match over several seasons, a rolling average designed to protect a big club from one bad year. Promotion and relegation were then suspended, and clubs at the bottom of the cociente table paid heavy fines instead — 80, 47 and 33 million pesos for the bottom three.
From the 2026–27 season that has gone too. The competition regulation now states that Liga MX clubs will not be relegated to the second tier, and clubs in that tier cannot be promoted. The fines have been abolished, and the cociente table survives for statistical purposes only. That is why you will not find a relegation zone drawn on any Liga MX table here: there is nothing for it to mark.
Who is in it
The 18 clubs of 2026–27 include a returning name. Atlante bought the affiliation of Mazatlán FC, and the league made Mazatlán's departure and Atlante's arrival official in April 2026. Mazatlán keeps a page on this site, marked as a former club, with its record through 2025–26.
Why this site shows results but not fixtures
No free, openly usable data source publishes live Liga MX scores or a list of upcoming fixtures. What we have is a results file, updated twice a week, with the bookmakers' closing odds. From it we build each tournament's table and reconstruct the Liguilla — a match between two clubs that have both completed their 17 games can only be a play-off. It is honest and it is a few days behind; the data sources page explains the rest.
The same idea elsewhere
Split seasons are the norm across Latin America, with local twists. Argentina plays an Apertura and a Clausura inside one calendar year, each in two zones of 15, and relegates on an annual table and a three-season points average rather than on either tournament. Brazil is the exception: one 38-round league played inside the calendar year — the 2026 season began in late January — like a European season on a different calendar.