Mikel Arriola said the FMF is looking for the best way to restore promotion to the Primera División while it keeps building an orderly pathway from amateur football to the top of the game. Speaking to AS in Azerbaiyán during the Mundial Sub 15, he said the federation is working through a pyramid that already runs from the sector amateur through Tercera División, Liga Premier and Liga de Expansión.
The comments matter now because they point to a possible structural shift in Mexican Soccer at a moment when the top flight still has no promotion and relegation. Arriola said the federation is not waiting for that debate to resolve itself before acting. It is already trying to design the route upward, one layer at a time, and he framed that effort as part of a wider development system that starts in primary school and reaches 1.3 million players each year.
That is where the scale becomes clearer. Arriola said Mexico already has what he described as the largest tournament in the country’s history for fifth and sixth grade, and he said the structure is meant to feed talent into a pyramid rather than leave it stranded at the base. He also said the FMF is looking for a way to bring universities into the same system, noting that nearly 1,400 universities in Mexico are public and private. In his view, the pathway is not just about clubs. It is about connecting school football, university football and the professional tiers under one ordered structure.
But the model is still incomplete at the top. Arriola did not spell out the exact format the FMF is considering for promotion to the Primera División, and that is the unanswered piece that now carries the most weight. The federation says it wants ascents to be orderly, yet the endpoint of that ladder remains under discussion while Liga MX stays closed to the traditional up-and-down system that defines most leagues.
Arriola also said the Mexican Under-15 team adapted well to eight-a-side football and artificial grass pitches at the tournament, and he argued that FIFA’s Under-15 event should be treated as a festival designed to build the base for 14- and 15-year-olds. For now, that leaves the same central question hanging over Mexican Soccer: how the FMF turns a broad development pyramid into a promotion model that actually reaches the Primera División.
