The Village That Has Now Hosted Three World Cups and Benefited from None of Them

A pre-Aztec community in Mexico City has watched its land, water, and homes erode across 64 years and three tournaments as the stadium next door gets a bank's name while residents receive water two days a week.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-06-08

The opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off on June 11 at the venue officially designated Mexico City Stadium for the tournament, the building most people still call the Estadio Azteca. Inside, 83,000 fans will watch Mexico face South Africa in a spectacle that cost roughly 3.6 billion pesos to stage. Outside, in the working-class streets of Santa Ursula Coapa just meters from the stadium's walls, residents will receive water that day the same way they usually do: perhaps not at all, perhaps for a few hours in the morning, at whatever pressure the pipes decide to provide. The community has now been next door to the world's most storied football stadium for 64 years. It has hosted a World Cup in 1970, a World Cup in 1986, and will host one again in 2026. Not one of those tournaments has produced a lasting infrastructure improvement for the people whose land the stadium was built on.

The September Morning That Changed Everything

Santa Ursula Coapa is not simply a neighborhood that grew up around a stadium. It is a pueblo originario, an indigenous settlement whose roots in the volcanic lava fields of southern Mexico City predate the Aztec Empire. The community was known in Nahuatl as Coapatl, meaning "river of serpents," and evidence of human habitation in the area stretches back to the Cuicuilco civilization of the third century. When the Aztecs built Tenochtitlan, Santa Ursula Coapa was already there. When the Spanish built Mexico City on top of Tenochtitlan, Santa Ursula Coapa remained, its communal lands intact, its ejidal territory a patchwork of volcanic rock and agricultural plots stretching toward what is now the Periferico ring road.

That ended on a morning in September 1962. Rubén Ramirez Almazan, today an adult authority figure in the community, was a small boy when it happened. He has described hearing his grandfather tell of the thunder of bulldozer motors startling the family awake. The federal government, under Federal District Regent Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, had decided the area would be the site of a new, world-class football stadium. More than 63,000 square meters of Santa Ursula's communal territory were seized through expropriation. Homes built of wood, cardboard, and corrugated metal were demolished. Families were pushed into the street. The official explanation for a second wave of evictions in September 1966, delivered by police subcommander Raul Mendiolea Cerecero, was that the demolitions were for "safety reasons" related to supposed explosions in volcanic rock mines. On the cleared ground, parking lots appeared.

The community organized and marched to the Chamber of Deputies. Their slogan was direct: "Public works without human feelings, never. The bulldozer policy must end." The protests were significant enough that Uruchurtu was ultimately removed from his position, though the stadium was already rising. Some displaced families received temporary housing. Many received nothing.

On May 29, 1966, the Estadio Azteca opened with a friendly match between Club America and the Italian club Torino. Designed by architects Pedro Ramirez Vazquez and Rafael Mijares, it seated 105,000 spectators. The people of Santa Ursula Coapa, whose land it stood on, were not offered seats for 99 years. That offer, by the way, went to the person who first submitted the name "Azteca" in the national naming competition organized by the Mexican postal service.

Two World Cups, Zero Legacy

In 1970, the World Cup came. In 1986, it came again. Pele lifted Brazil's third trophy here. Diego Maradona scored the Hand of God goal here. These are among the most famous moments in the history of sport, broadcast to hundreds of millions. The community next door watched its roads flood each rainy season, its water supply arrive erratically, and the traffic from match days trap residents inside their own streets for hours.

Rubén Ramirez, the community authority who has now led resistance through the third World Cup cycle, said it plainly at a public event earlier this year: "The Estadio Azteca has already hosted two World Cups, in 1970 and 1986. This will be the third. They talk a lot about legacy, but nothing positive has lasted for the community. Our streets are still flooded during the rainy season, the sewage system is in poor condition, and some neighbors still have no water supply."

Between tournaments, the stadium became Latin America's largest, at one point seating more than 107,000. Club America and Cruz Azul played here. The Rolling Stones played here. Concerts, boxing matches, and international friendlies filled the calendar. None of the commercial revenue was directed toward the infrastructure of the surrounding community.

The Well, the Permit, and the 370-Meter Measurement

The current crisis traces to 2018 and 2019. Televisa, the Mexican media conglomerate that owns both the stadium through its subsidiary Grupo Ollamani and the broadcast rights for the World Cup, obtained a water extraction concession from the Organismo de Cuencas del Valle de Mexico, the regional division of Mexico's national water authority CONAGUA. The concession, filed under folio 811 078 on June 27, 2019, authorized Televisa to extract 450 million liters of water annually from a well drilled on land adjacent to the stadium.

The problem is location. CONAGUA's own regulations prohibit new wells from being drilled within 500 meters of an existing community well. Santa Ursula Coapa's community well is 370 meters away from Televisa's well, according to measurements made by activist and resident Guadalupe Castillo using official maps. Castillo showed those maps to a delegation from SACMEX, the Mexico City water authority, during an inspection visit in April 2024. The SACMEX delegate confirmed on that visit that the well exists and is operating.

The community's existing wells were historically 80 meters deep. The new Televisa well, drilled in 2021, goes to 350 meters. Residents say the deeper well is drawing from the same aquifer that feeds the shallower community wells, compressing the water table and accelerating scarcity. Santa Ursula Coapa depends almost entirely on its local aquifer: unlike most of central Mexico City, it is not connected to the Cutzamala System. "If the water level drops," Castillo warned, "the water will become contaminated because the rocks release toxic minerals."

The project also contemplated not one well but six, with a combined permitted extraction rate of 50 liters per second and a total annual volume of 1,576,800 cubic meters. The concession was granted under a legal mechanism called the Sistema de Actuacion por Cooperacion, approved in 2017, which allows private developers to intervene in designated urban polygons with government support. Residents note that 1954 federal decrees prohibited new well drilling to protect the water table, and that those decrees remain technically in force.

The authorization was granted without the free, prior, and informed consultation legally required under both the Mexico City Constitution and ILO Convention 169, which Mexico has ratified. "It was a deceptive consultation," said Natalia Lara, a resident and member of the Neighborhood Assembly against Megaprojects. "They asked people if they would like to have water in their neighborhood. When people said yes, they answered that they could go get it at the shopping mall. The community's own representative was not even informed."

The Real Estate Layer

The water dispute is one front in a broader development pressure. The Conjunto Estadio Azteca project, announced in 2021, envisions more than 100,000 square meters of new construction: a shopping center, hotel towers, and residential buildings oriented toward short-term rental platforms. The project was developed under the same SAC framework that governs the Mitikah complex in Xoco, a development that residents there fought and largely lost.

The Conjunto Estadio Azteca is currently described as on hold following community opposition. But activists like Lara are specific about what that means in practice: "The developer is Televisa. They have everything in place to move forward with the project: the land, the permits, and, most importantly, the water." The hold is procedural. The infrastructure is positioned.

Meanwhile, rents in Santa Ursula Coapa have tripled in anticipation of World Cup tourism. Monthly rents moved from approximately 8,000 pesos to more than 24,000 pesos, according to Lara. For a community of working-class residents, many of them elderly with deep family roots, this is effective economic displacement without a demolition order.

Televisa itself has operated in the shadow of the FIFA Gate corruption scandal. In 2017, the New York Times published an investigation linking a Televisa subsidiary, the Swiss-registered company Mountrigi, to the payment of bribes to high-ranking FIFA officials in exchange for broadcasting rights for the 2018 through 2030 World Cups. In 2023, Televisa agreed to pay USD 95 million to US shareholders to settle a lawsuit accusing the broadcaster of concealing its connection to the scandal and artificially inflating its share value. Emilio Azcarraga Jean stepped down as chairman of Televisa's board in October 2024. He now chairs Grupo Ollamani, the conglomerate created to operate Televisa's sports and entertainment businesses, including Azteca Stadium.

The Bank's Name on the Stadium

In February 2025, Ollamani and Grupo Banorte announced a financial agreement that restructured the stadium renovation funding. Banorte would provide a 2.1 billion peso credit line, repaid over 12 years, in exchange for naming rights and extensive advertising presence throughout the venue. Ollamani had already invested 1.5 billion pesos in renovations. The combined investment of roughly 3.6 billion pesos represents the most expensive transformation in the stadium's 58-year history.

Azcarraga Jean called it "an honor to unite with the most important financial institution in the country." By the Friday of that announcement week, the Azteca signage was being removed from the stadium's exterior walls.

FIFA's own sponsorship rules mean that during the World Cup itself, the Banorte name is also stripped: the venue is referred to in official broadcasts as Mexico City Stadium. The community that gave it its informal nickname, the Coloso de Santa Ursula, watches its surroundings renamed while the underlying conditions remain unchanged.

The stadium reopened on March 28, 2026, with a friendly match between Mexico and Portugal. Protesters gathered outside under a banner that read: "El Mundial pasa, el despojo se queda." The World Cup passes, the dispossession remains. A mural that read "There are no clean games on stolen lands," painted over a Coca-Cola holiday advertisement, was erased within 24 hours by city workers. The community repainted it the following Sunday.

The Official Response

Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada addressed the water dispute publicly during a World Cup-themed press conference staged at the stadium alongside President Claudia Sheinbaum. Brugada said the stadium well was now "in the hands" of the city. At a follow-up meeting the next day, city officials told residents they had no specific plan to revoke Televisa's concession.

In later statements, Brugada said her administration had rehabilitated eight wells in the area and that water access was the "first thing" her government addressed. Residents in surrounding colonias say water still arrives irregularly and that the fundamental issue, the private extraction concession operating 370 meters from their community well, remains active.

A Grupo Ollamani spokesperson said the company "works very closely with the surrounding communities" and collaborates with "the local government in order to alleviate their needs." Mexico's President Sheinbaum, responding to a UN Committee report criticizing conditions around the stadium, said: "The actions we have taken were not considered." The report itself was not withdrawn.

What a Third World Cup Looks Like From Inside the Shadow

The opening ceremony on June 11 will feature Mana, Alejandro Fernandez, Los Angeles Azules, J Balvin, Belinda, and South Africa's Tyla performing in front of a global television audience. Mexico has declared the day a local public holiday. The stadium, renovated at a combined cost exceeding 3.6 billion pesos, will host five tournament matches in total.

The community of Santa Ursula Coapa, roughly 200,000 people in the immediate vicinity, is entering the rainy season, which historically brings flooding to streets whose drainage infrastructure has not been meaningfully upgraded in decades. The Televisa water extraction concession remains valid. The Conjunto Estadio Azteca permits are suspended but not revoked. The rents have tripled. The bridge murals are repainted each Sunday and erased each Monday.

Rubén Ramirez has one observation that encapsulates the pattern across all three cycles: "If Televisa supplies water to the city, the well should be expropriated for public use. Water is a human right, not a commodity." That sentence, directed at the same institution that held local broadcast rights for the 1970 and 1986 tournaments, captures the structural logic of what Santa Ursula Coapa has lived through. A private entity extracts value from proximity to the world's largest sporting event. The community absorbs the costs. The World Cup ends. The dispossession remains.