Santos Laguna: Three Wins After More Than Two Years, and a Song Nobody Sings Correctly

The singing started in the stand behind the goal, the cheapest and loudest corner of Estadio Corona, where the desert wind of Torreón blows back against the green flags and puffs them up like sails. A man of about sixty, cap pulled low over half his face, was singing Color Esperanza with the wrong words. He went wrong exactly where the whole stand was waiting for him. The word “esperanza” he stretched into three notes, drifting loose from the drumbeat underneath. Nobody corrected him. Twenty thousand people followed him into that wrong interval, and for thirty seconds Torreón had its own national anthem, one that appears in no Liga MX document.

I was eleven time zones away, sitting in a small apartment in Osaka, headphones plugged into a recorder that has travelled with me for more than twenty years. Outside the window the city had gone to sleep. Inside the headphones, the desert was singing. An empty stadium does not make a match smaller, it only makes the memory bigger. That night the stadium was not empty, and what I heard was not a victory. It was a city healing itself by singing badly.

The context: a club living on memory while stuck in the present

Santos Laguna belongs to Torreón, an industrial city in the northern desert of Mexico, where Coahuila meets Durango and Chihuahua. They are called Los Guerreros, the warriors, and the name once fitted. This is one of the most decorated clubs in Liga MX, a team accustomed to the top half of the table, to big matches, to stands filling before the ball rolled.

A club that lives on tradition can also die by tradition. When results stop arriving, memory becomes pressure instead of support. Seven consecutive matches without a win is enough to turn any Mexican stand sour, and in Torreón, where football is the only light on cold desert evenings, the turning is louder than anywhere else.

The supporters began to laugh. Not the bitter mockery of strangers, but the laughter of people watching a relative fumble. They took a phrase from the club's principal, Alejandro Irarragorri, turned it into a joke, then into a symbol, then into a song. That song was Color Esperanza, the Diego Torres track released in 2026, written about hope for a world that badly needed it.

Across those seven winless matches there was almost nothing technical to hold on to. Local coverage spoke of spirit, of confidence, of a team that had forgotten how to win. Tactical breakdowns appeared and were barely shared. What was shared were short clips of the stand singing, a man singing badly, children in green shirts lifting their arms to the beat.

I used to think Mexican fans were loud the way happy people are loud. This time I understood they were loud the way people are loud when they are trying not to be silent. Silence means thinking about the table. Singing means thinking about nothing at all.

The anatomy of a song: from mockery to unofficial anthem

Color Esperanza is not a football song. It is a Latin pop single released more than two decades ago, written as encouragement for people who have lost their bearings. Precisely because it does not belong to football, football could take it.

The story began with a sentence. Irarragorri, the man at the head of the club, spoke about the team's hope in a way that initially read as empty rhetoric. Supporters took the word “hope”, paired it with the club's green, and produced the meme “mi esperanza es verde” — my hope is green. At first it was mockery. A leader's phrase turned into a terrace joke is the classic signal that supporters have lost faith in the boardroom.

Then a video surfaced. Irarragorri singing Color Esperanza. He does not sing well, and that is the clip's strength. A club president singing a song about hope badly while his team cannot win a match is material no editor could improve on.

What happened next is the interesting part. The supporters stopped laughing. They sang along. The song moved from a symbol of failure to a symbol of patience. Some goals are not written into the match report; they live in the way a bar sings the wrong words. In Torreón, the first goal of the revival was scored by nobody. It was scored by twenty thousand people holding one off-beat interval.

After that, it spilled onto the pitch in a very physical way. When the team wins, supporters sing louder. When supporters sing louder, players run further. That mechanism appears in no data model, and it is something anyone who has ever sat in a stand knows to be real.

The rhythm of a team does not sit in the players' legs; it sits in the shared pulse of a city. In Torreón that pulse was already there, waiting for an excuse to beat again.

The core: three wins and the order they arrived in

Looked at through the quality of opposition, the three-match streak has a clear gradient.

The first was a 2-1 win over Bravos de Juárez, the bottom side, the weakest opponent available at that moment. A team coming off seven winless matches needs exactly that: not proof of anything grand, but a reminder of what winning feels like. In football, the feeling of winning is a skill, and skills decay when unused.

The second was an away trip to Toluca, against the Diablos Rojos, one of the deepest traditions in Liga MX. Santos Laguna fell behind and came back to win 3-2. That kind of victory carries far more psychological value than a comfortable one. Trailing away from home against a higher-rated opponent and then winning means the team can absorb pressure and respond after half-time. That is not evidence of a superior system; it is evidence of a changed mental state.

The third was a 1-0 win over Pachuca, a club of a different stature, a regular presence near the top with a respected academy. Winning 1-0 against Pachuca is the kind of result a recovering team produces: no dominance, no control, but enough solidity to protect one goal and take three points.

Three matches, three types of opponent, three different margins. What struck me was the nature of the wins. Two of the three were settled by a single goal, and one of those was a comeback. Narrow wins have a well-documented statistical trait: they reverse more easily than dominant ones. A team that wins 3-0 by controlling the game can reproduce that structure. A team that wins 1-0 on a single moment cannot be sure of reproducing anything.

That is why I treat this streak cautiously, even though I like the story behind it.

More important than the scorelines is the timeline. The last time Santos Laguna won three in a row was in Clausura 2026, beating Mazatlán, Querétaro and Cruz Azul in sequence. More than two years separate the two runs. For a club once used to the top half, two years without three consecutive wins points to erosion across an organisation, not merely a bad patch of form.

Thirty-three years in this trade have taught me that a three-win streak never equals a revival. It means a team has recovered enough state not to throw itself away in the last fifteen minutes. The distance between those two things is enormous.

Fixture order: an advantage that cannot be ordered in advance

Football analysis talks endlessly about opponents and forgets sequence. Santos Laguna's run began with the easiest match available. Bravos de Juárez sit bottom, and a team in a mental crisis could not have asked for a softer entry.

This is the standard pattern for teams leaving a crisis: the first game is a reintroduction to winning, the second is the real test, the third is confirmation. After Toluca, the team knew it could come from behind. After Pachuca, it knew it could keep a clean sheet against a stronger side.

The problem is that this sequence cannot be ordered on demand. Next comes Atlético de San Luis and Querétaro, described locally as chances to keep adding points and climb the table. That language is honest: this club is not talking about a title, it is talking about climbing. The realistic target is the Liguilla play-off, and in a league split into two short tournaments a year, a three-win streak carries far more weight than the same streak in a 38-game season.

In Liga MX, qualification for the Liguilla can hinge on roughly a third of a season. A small run of wins can therefore change a club's entire position. The structure turns short moments into heavy ones. Three wins in Torreón are not just three wins. They are a door.

But that door opened because the fixture list started with the bottom club, and fixture lists like that do not arrive on request.

The absent figure: no coach is named anywhere

What caught my attention most in this whole story is not what was written but what was not.

No head coach is named. No sporting director appears. No formation, no system change, no personnel adjustment is described. In an article about a club escaping seven winless matches, that is a very strange gap.

There are two readings. The first is that the team won without its coaching staff, which is close to impossible. The second is that the staff did work, but the story was told along a different axis by supporters and media — the emotional axis, the song, the president. In that case, the coach's absence is not a fact but an editorial choice.

I lean towards the second reading. When a football story is told through the stand rather than the touchline, the storyteller usually picks the loudest voice in the room. In Torreón right now, the loudest voice belongs to the stand, and to an owner singing badly.

This is where I want to be blunt, because supporters deserve to hear it: if Santos Laguna keep winning, credit will be shared with the stand. If they start losing again, responsibility will belong to the dugout. That asymmetry exists everywhere, but it is sharper at clubs whose public image is fused with an ownership family.

The counter-intuitive angle: the song does not win matches

The popular version goes like this: the club was mocked, the fans sang, the club won, love conquered all. It is a beautiful story, and it is true in its emotional half. It is wrong in its causal half.

A song does not produce three points. What produced three points was a back line holding its distances through the final twenty minutes against Pachuca. It was a team refusing to collapse after going behind at Toluca. Those things come from daily work on the training pitch, from load management, from well-timed substitutions, from a young midfielder deciding not to lose the ball in the middle third.

So why tell the song story at all?

Because the song does something tactics cannot: it turns a loose collection of individuals into a group with one shared thing to believe in. During the seven winless matches, Santos Laguna's biggest problem was not squad quality. It was players walking out knowing every mistake would be remembered. When the stand sings, that feeling shrinks. When it shrinks, players attempt things they previously avoided.

Here is the genuinely counter-intuitive point: supporters do not score goals, but supporters set the level of risk players are willing to take. A stand ready to forgive produces a team willing to play the difficult pass. A stand ready to mock produces a team passing backwards.

There is a second, less cheerful counter-intuitive point. The same mechanism that converted mockery into a song can invert at similar speed. If Santos Laguna lose to Atlético de San Luis and Querétaro after the FIFA break, the people singing today will be the first to change the words. Songs are not loyal. Stands are not loyal. Only results are loyal, and results are always temporary.

I have watched that mechanism twice in two different countries, and both times it moved faster than I expected.

The FIFA break: the biggest enemy of a winning run

Football has an opponent that never appears in the table and has no coach: the international calendar.

The FIFA window is the period when domestic leagues pause for national teams. For a team with momentum, it is a rhythm breaker. Called-up players return later, more tired, or worse, injured. Those who stay lose match sharpness. A collective state built over three weeks can dissolve in ten days.

Local coverage in Torreón admitted as much: the challenge now is to maintain momentum after the FIFA break. That is an honest sentence, and it frames the biggest question of the coming phase. Santos Laguna won three matches in a high emotional state. Can they win when that state is interrupted?

The answer will come against Atlético de San Luis and Querétaro. Those are the two fixtures the club itself has targeted for points and for climbing. If they win, three becomes four, then five, and the revival story has a foundation. If they do not, three becomes a statistical anomaly and everything resets.

In Liga MX, where table position decides Liguilla qualification, matches like these are called six-pointers. The club knows it. The supporters know it. The desert wind does not care.

From Osaka: why I am writing about Torreón

I live in Osaka, more than eleven thousand kilometres from Torreón. I have no direct professional reason to follow Santos Laguna. I have a different reason, and it relates to how I have done this job for thirty-three years.

In 2026 I covered Cerezo Osaka at Yanmar Nagai. That night a 22-year-old midfielder named Hiroaki Okuno received the ball at the edge of the box and drove it low into the far corner to seal a 1-0 win. Twenty-five thousand people stood at once. I was in the press area, and I felt the stand shake before I heard the roar, and I understood I was watching a city forget its fear.

That night I wrote about strangers hugging in the stands. It was shared widely, and I learned something I have kept since: most readers do not come to football to understand tactics. They come to understand themselves inside a collective moment.

In the summer of 2026 I organised a watch-along for Japan against Belgium in a small Osaka bar. Japan led 2-0 and lost 2-3 in the final three minutes. The bar went silent. I stayed with about fifty people until three in the morning, recorded their choked words, and wrote that defeat is a shared wound, not one man's fault. People do not remember the score; they remember why they did not leave the bar. The shouts of that night still echo in me, though Osaka went to sleep long ago.

Those experiences taught me that some football events cannot be captured by numbers. In Torreón I recognised the same kind of event, only in Spanish, in a desert city I have never set foot in.

Vietnamese supporters understand this better than most. We have sung at Mỹ Đình in matches where nobody rated us. We have sung after defeats. We have turned somebody's phrase into a catchphrase, then into a song, then into something a whole generation remembers. That mechanism does not belong to Mexico. It belongs wherever there is a stand and a team that needs forgiving.

The ownership family and the question of identity

One detail matters more to me than the three wins: the two most visible figures in this story are not players but members of the ownership family.

Alejandro Irarragorri heads the club and is the source of the phrase that became a song. Aleco Irarragorri, an executive, appeared in a box-celebration video after the win at Toluca. Both figure emotionally rather than administratively.

At many European clubs, owners sign cheques and stay in meeting rooms. In Torreón, the owner sings on screen and stands in the stand. This is the model of a club whose public identity is fused with one family. Its strength is commitment. Its weakness is concentrated accountability.

When results are good, the family is the heart of the club. When they are bad, the family is the stand's first target. There is no buffer.

For supporters this creates a complicated emotional position. They mocked a president's phrase, then sang that same phrase, then won three matches, and now must decide whether they are singing to mock or to believe. On most terraces in the world the answer is both at once. Supporters rarely settle on a single meaning.

I write this as observation, not criticism. It explains why the story travelled so fast. It has an early antagonist, a reversal and an open ending. That is the structure of a play, and Latin American football has always been told as one.

What will tell us whether the streak is real or an anomaly

Asked to name the signals worth tracking over the coming weeks, I would pick four, none of them related to the song.

The first is goals conceded. Two of the three wins came by a single goal. If the team keeps its concessions low in the next fixtures, that points to structure. If they rise again, the streak was a product of luck and a soft schedule.

The second is squad availability after the FIFA break. A side with limited depth suffers more from an interrupted calendar than a big club. If Santos Laguna return with their key men, momentum survives. If two or three important players are missing, the story has to be rewritten.

The third is how the stand reacts the first time the team falls behind at home. That is the most honest test of a revival, because it measures real patience rather than excitement.

The fourth is whether the story converts into something durable. A viral song can become a club marketing asset, or it can dissolve with the winning run. In Liga MX, where the stand is part of the commercial product, that difference has real economic value.

I will not predict the results against Atlético de San Luis and Querétaro. Prediction is a young man's trade. My trade is to write down what I hear before it is forgotten.

What I bring back from Torreón, though I have never been there

After pieces like this I ask myself one question: has this story changed how I understand football?

This time the answer is yes, though not in the direction I expected.

I used to think a club escaped a crisis by fixing what was broken. Fix the back line. Fix the transitions. Fix the response to pressure. Torreón taught me something else: sometimes a club escapes a crisis by changing how the stand feels about it, and that feeling flows back into the dressing room in a way no tactical meeting can manufacture.

That does not make me believe emotion outranks work. It makes me believe work cannot take effect unless somebody believes it will. Santos Laguna's three wins were not a miracle. They were the product of a group that stopped being afraid of error, and stopping being afraid is a technical achievement in the truest sense.

At my age you stop counting trophies; you count the nights a whole city stays awake. Torreón just had three such nights. Two of them happened away from home, which means the city stayed awake in different rooms, in different time zones, singing the same song off the beat.

The next phase will answer the bigger question, the one I cannot answer with any data I hold: is this a team that has found its rhythm, or a city that has had one good evening. I will watch the Atlético de San Luis match with my headphones ready. Not to hear the commentator. To hear the stand.