Necaxa

Aguascalientes, a city built around thermal springs in central Mexico, took in a club that had spent eighty years playing under someone else's roof. When Necaxa left Mexico City in 2003, it wasn't chasing a new market so much as escaping an old problem: no stadium of its own in the capital, and a support base that had thinned out over years of drifting between grounds. Aguascalientes gave the club a region with older ties to it and, eventually, a home ground of its own — Estadio Victoria, with 23,851 seats.

The name predates that move by eight decades and has nothing to do with a sponsor, which the federation banned outright. It comes from the Necaxa river, near the hydroelectric plant whose workers merged with the capital's tram-company side in 1923. Under that name the club built its first great side in the 1930s, a forward line still remembered in Mexico as the Once Hermanos, the Eleven Brothers, with Horacio Casarín up front.

Money trouble forced an odd detour in 1971: new owners renamed the club Atlético Español and swapped red and white for black and white. Eleven years later, in 1982, both the name and the colours came back. What followed was Necaxa's strongest run — seven Liga MX titles in total, four of them in the 1930s and three more inside a single stretch from 1995 to 1998 under coach Manuel Lapuente. Ecuadorian midfielder Álex Aguinaga made 473 appearances across those years, and Ricardo Peláez left as the club's all-time leading scorer with 138 goals.

The fixture against Atlante still carries its original class divide, dating to 1927, back when both clubs played in Mexico City: Necaxa as the electricity company's side, Atlante as the workers'.