Deportivo Ayense

The 2023–24 final should have been the moment Ayotlán returned to Serie A: Deportivo Ayense had just won the Liga Premier Serie B and faced Aguacateros CD Uruapan in the promotion playoff, a single tie standing between a small Jalisco club and the level it had left two decades earlier.

Deportivo Ayense had folded in the mid-2000s, and its return in 2019 came from an arrangement between Ayotlán's municipal government and a Mexican-American businessman known locally as Don Alfonso, entering the club straight into the Liga TDP rather than reviving it at the level it had left.

That earlier spell had been the club's best. Promoted out of the Tercera División in its very first season, 1988–89, Ayense went on to win the Segunda División "B" in 1990–91 and earned a playoff shot at the Primera División.

The club still plays in blue and white at Estadio Chino Rivas, a ground holding around 3,500, and carries the nickname La Furia Azul. Its closest rivalry, against Gorilas de Juanacatlán, has none of the trappings of a named derby — just two Jalisco sides meeting regularly in the Liga Premier Serie B table, in a fixture with no name at all.

Whatever happened against Uruapan, the club Ayotlán had been asked to build again in 2019 was, by 2024, back knocking on the same door it had first opened in 1991.