Tuca spilled the beans on Mexico’s practices

Last wednesday, ‘Tuca’ Ferretti issued one of the most revealing statements in modern Mexican soccer. Ferretti, who began coaching in the early 1990’s and has won multiple leagues with various Liga MX clubs in the last 30 years, had a few stints as national coach in 2015 and 2018. Tuca came in after Miguel Herrera was unexpectedly fired, and filled in the void until the Femexfut hired a new coach. The most important game of his short administration was a match against the U.S., which would determine the representative of CONCACAF in the 2017 Confederations Cup, and he ended up winning. Later he coached the national team again after the 2018 World Cup in Qatar also as an interim coach.

Now, Ferretti is a pundit of the influential show Futbol Picante on ESPN and in this program he mentioned that the Femexfut had imposed on him a number of players that had to be called up for the national team.

Ferretti mentioned that the likes of Hector Herrera, Andres Guardado and Raul Jimenez had a preference due to the commercials that they had to shoot. They shot these ads when they concentrated with the team to play some unimportant friendly games, aptly baptized ‘moleros’ by Tuca himself.

Also, when another pundit of the show asked him if Guillermo Ochoa had to be called, he looked at the camera and blinked once as if confirming that in fact the goalkeeper had to be called. At the time Ochoa was playing with Malaga in Spain’s La Liga, but he has been a symbol of Club America, a club owned by Televisa, who in turn have a great influence in the Femexfut, as Tuca’s revelations just confirmed. 

Ferretti also mentioned that those players were, in theory, the best Mexico had to offer at the time, so it wasn’t a ludicrous idea to call them. He also mentioned that he accepted this less than ideal situation because he was just an interim coach with an outstanding contract with Tigres, which he honoured even though the FMF did offer him the full time job of coaching El Tri.

These statements come at a time when the current coach has to deal with a perceived risk of being fired, due to the fact that he came to El Tri also as an interim coach, and because of his lack of experience as coach. As such, his independence of any external pressure could be easily questioned, specially when as of late there has been a campaign from the femexfut promoting the recent call-up of America’s striker Julian Quiñones. The striker recently became a naturalized Mexican citizen and the Femexfut has wildly advertised his arrival to El Tri in social media, in a move that seems to be similar to what Ferretti described.