Atlas

Guadalajara already had a team wearing its name by 1916, so a group of young men from the city's elite families put together a side of their own and hence a football team with a name borrowed from a giant of Greek myth rather than the city itself. The academy habit stuck: Atlas built its reputation less on trophies than on a production line for young players, which is why it still carries the nickname La Academia alongside the more common Zorros, and why the club has spent long stretches producing talent for others to sign.

Titles came slowly and then in a rush. After winning the league in 1951, Atlas went without a championship for seventy years, a wait that ended with the Apertura 2021 title and was doubled almost immediately by the Clausura 2022. In between those two long stretches sat a handful of domestic cups from the 1940s to the 1960s, won in the era before the long drought set in.

None of that softens the Clásico Tapatío. Chivas plays a few miles across the same city, and the fixture carries a weight that neither club's continental record — Atlas never went past a group stage in the Copa Libertadores — comes close to matching. Home games are played at Estadio Jalisco, a ground whose capacity is put at 56,713 in most counts, though Mexican sources trim that figure slightly.

Ask supporters for one name from the 2021 breakthrough and most will say Julio Furch, the forward whose goals carried Atlas through that Apertura and gave a club used to near misses its first title in a lifetime.