Opinion: A World Cup loss can’t sap the country’s incurable optimism

Amigos, the silence after England’s goals hit like a bucket of cold water. The hope we felt again when the Mexican national team scored two goals kept us on the edge of our seats for 100 minutes. And when the match ended, through tears, we applauded the players, ourselves and the incurable optimism that makes us believe that, whatever the circumstances, everything is going to be okay. What might look, at first glance, like a coping mechanism for our reality is actually proof of Mexicans’ resilience.

Solidarity in the face of tragedy (or in this case, soccer) isn’t unique to Mexico. After an earthquake, a hurricane or a war, people everywhere tend to organize and help each other — that’s simply the human condition. What does seem distinctly Mexican is what comes after that first instinct: the collective conviction that if we all pitch in — le echamos ganas — things will get better. That extra layer of shared optimism, I suspect, is what explains why we’re happier than economies far richer than ours. And this is where the numbers start talking.

An optimism you can actually measure

I went to the Mexico-Ecuador match. The energy in the stadium was unlike anything I’d experienced, and it wasn’t just me being dramatic — international commentators kept saying the same thing. Those of us who work in the arts know the phenomenon, where a piece moves you so deeply that you cry, your blood pressure drops or you feel lightheaded — it’s known as Stendhal syndrome. It’s the only way I can explain what nearly 80,000 people singing the national anthem with that kind of raw, overflowing passion feels like. I cried. I spent more than 90 minutes screaming, cheering on the national team and booing Ecuador.

But walking out, I saw dozens of my fellow Mexicans hoisting Ecuadorian, Korean, South African and Czech fans up on their hands and tossing them into the air to the cry of “¡quiere volar!” — loosely, “they want to fly!” — a boisterous, half-teasing ritual usually reserved for our own celebrations, now flooding social media this tournament. Even in defeat, we figured a little airborne send-off might lift a losing fan’s spirits. Days earlier, at the Ángel de la Independencia after the opening match, all it took was one person, soaked like everyone else, shouting “¡México, México!” for the chant to become communal.

Mexico’s communal spirit in action

I’d seen that same instinct before, under far harder circumstances. In 2017, when I was living in Colonia Roma, an earthquake shook Mexico City. Within 30 minutes, Hospital Obregón had set up a fully functioning operating room in the middle of the street, with help from whoever happened to be passing by. I watched people fall into complete silence, so rescue workers could listen for sounds beneath the rubble, and thousands of volunteers organize within minutes to cook, care for the injured and spread information — no one coordinating it from the top. It just happened.

It wasn’t the first time. Thirty-two years earlier, the 1985 earthquake killed thousands and left the government paralyzed for 36 hours — so ordinary citizens and university students organized themselves into rescue brigades instead, pulling close to 4,000 people out alive. That spontaneous response gave birth to the Topos Tlatelolco rescue brigade, which four decades later still travels the world to help wherever disaster strikes — the same brigadistas who were on the ground helping in Venezuela this year. Many trace the birth of Mexico’s modern civil society back to that day.

Forty-one years after 1985, that same reflex switched on again — not for a tragedy this time, but for a party.

By the numbers

Mexico hosted only 13 of the tournament’s 104 matches — the honest disclaimer behind everything that follows. And yet, in just the first 20 days, the three host cities generated an estimated 45 billion pesos in economic activity, with Concanaco Servytur projecting a final total above 65 billion pesos (or US $3.71 billion).

The England-Mexico match broke national viewership records with 60 million people watching. The night I screamed myself hoarse at the Ángel, it turns out, wasn’t just me getting carried away: we broke the record for the largest crowd ever gathered in the capital, 1.4 million people chanting “México” in the rain. Adidas sold more than 5 million Mexico jerseys worldwide, half of them here at home — and roughly 5 million more were counterfeit. It’s nothing to be proud of, but proof of just how many people wanted in on the party.

Being a World Cup host felt like opening the door of your own home for a party: not the biggest house, nor the fanciest one, but shared with all the enthusiasm and warmth we had. We don’t need to be the ones who profit the most to be the ones who enjoy it the most — and spread it to everyone around us.

How do we do it?

Being hosts made me ask: How, despite all our problems and shortcomings — the ones we’re painfully aware of — do we still find the energy to be happy, and to want to spread that happiness to whoever is standing next to us? Mexico ranks 12th in the 2026 World Happiness Report, an annual measure of self-perceived well-being from the Gallup World Poll and the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre. By that ranking, we sit above the United States (23rd), Canada (25th) and the United Kingdom (29th).

The report is honest about why: It isn’t gross domestic product. It’s family ties, a social support network we can actually lean on, and a cultural resilience that carries us through hard times better than richer nations manage. Other countries on the list lean on strong institutions. We lean on each other.

Optimism undergirded by realism … or surrealism

But there might be a simpler explanation too, and it has nothing to do with surveys: We are painfully aware that there’s only one life, and it’s meant to be lived, not managed. That awareness expresses itself as something close to surrealism — not metaphorically, but the way André Breton meant it when he called Mexico “the most surrealist country in the world” after visiting in 1938. (The line is often misattributed to Salvador Dalí, but no historian has ever found it in anything he wrote, and there’s no record he ever set foot here.)

You see it everywhere: a goat and a dog headbutting each other at the Zócalo Fan Fest and nobody blinking twice. A duck strutting down the street in a national team jersey. A mascot dressed as a doctor turning up at a funeral one day, a religious procession the next and playing with a stranger’s dog the day after that. It isn’t chaos. It’s a kind of joy that doesn’t ask permission — the same joy that lets us fall hard for a duck, a Dr. Simi or a soccer team.

Closing

We lost the World Cup, yes. But there’s always a hug waiting. And that hug always carries the same words, the ones we’ve repeated across generations, between neighbors and strangers alike, after a tragedy or after a goal: “Everything is going to be okay,” because we have each other. We go back to facing all the problems that weigh on us — and there are many — but with the certainty that we are a nation that truly knows solidarity.

And if you, like me, are sitting with that post-World Cup emptiness today, let me tell you what someone told me: “What if we actually do it in Morocco 2030? What if it’s the women’s national team that finally does it?” If 11 players can move us like this, what else could we do? What other reasons could get us shouting “México” together? ¿Y si sí? What if this time, we do?

Maria Meléndez writes for Mexico News Daily in Mexico City.