Guillermo Almada’s teams have gone six straight Liga MX matches without beating Chivas, a run that has turned a once-balanced matchup into a stubborn problem. Since January 2022, those sides have met six times and Almada’s teams have scored only two goals.
That is why the search around Carlos Álvarez is back now: the next meeting arrives with the streak still intact, and the numbers behind it are hard to ignore. In the first five meetings after Almada took over, Pachuca and his teams produced eight goals for and two against, with three wins and two draws. In the six matches since that January 2022 win over Chivas, the average has fallen to 0.33 goals per match, down from 1.6 in the earlier five-game stretch.
The sequence tells its own story. After the 2-1 win in January 2022 that stretched Almada’s start against Guadalajara in Liga MX to five unbeaten matches, the matchup turned the other way. The six games since then finished 0-0, 1-1, 0-0, 0-1, 0-2 and 1-2, leaving Almada’s teams with three draws and then three losses. They failed to score in four of those six matches, and the last goal in the sequence came in February 2025, when Pachuca lost 2-1.
The pattern matters because it has survived more than one opposing bench. The three losses in the streak came against Fernando Gago, Arturo Ortega and Óscar García, and Gabriel Milito will be the fourth coach Almada faces inside the same run. That is a longer test than one bad night or one tactical mismatch; it is a matchup that has steadily narrowed the space Almada’s teams usually find.
There is also a sharper contrast sitting beside it. América have scored 15 goals in seven Apertura 2026 matches, starting with two goals in the first two rounds and then 13 in the next five. They had already scored at least two goals in five straight Liga MX matches after their first loss of the tournament, but the 4-3 game against Cruz Azul changed the tone of that surge. América trailed 4-0 at Estadio Azteca before responding late through Brian Rodríguez, Óscar Perea and Miguel Borja, and Almada said afterward that the team had defended very badly even as it created enough chances to hit the posts two or three times.
That is what makes the Chivas streak harder to dismiss. The attack has not disappeared completely; the problem is that Chivas have repeatedly forced Almada’s teams into low-scoring, narrow games, and the run is still alive heading into the next meeting. If the numbers hold, the question is no longer whether Almada can produce chances against Chivas. It is whether his team can finally turn one of them into the result that has been missing since January 2022.
