Necaxa U21

The teams that carried the Necaxa name in the 1990s were built around an idea the club has never fully let go of: that a side from a power company's works team could beat anyone in Mexico. Three league titles arrived inside four years — 1994-95, 1995-96 and Invierno 1998.

Since 2003 the club has played in Aguascalientes, at Estadio Victoria, a 23,000-seat ground that the U21 side shares with the first team. The senior squad's white home shirt and red change kit are the ones the youth teams wear. Los Rayos — the Lightning — followed from the same source.

The under-21 competition exists to feed that first team, and the fixture list reflects it: the reserve sides of the Liga MX clubs, played on the same weekends as the seniors, often at the same venues. A game against San Luis U21 is the kind of afternoon where a manager can hand a debut to a 17-year-old and see what happens over 90 minutes rather than 20.

What the youth section is measured against is the 1999 CONCACAF Champions Cup, still the club's only continental trophy, and the 2018 Copa MX and Supercopa MX — the last silverware the senior side has taken. Nothing has followed. The pressure on the academy is straightforward enough: produce players good enough to change that, and produce them cheaply, because Necaxa has not been able to buy its way back to the position it held 30 years ago.