Santos Laguna U21

Six league titles have gone to Torreón since 1996, and the last of them, in 2018, was followed by the Campeón de Campeones — the meeting of the season's two champions — which the club had never won before. That double is the high point of a run that began with the Invierno 1996 championship and continued through Clausura wins in 2008, 2012 and 2015. The one trophy that sits outside that sequence came in Apertura 2014, when Santos Laguna took the Copa MX in a straight knockout.

The senior club started as Club Santos IMSS Laguna on 4 September 1983, and the nicknames grew out of the place as much as the shirt: Guerreros, but also Laguneros, for the people of the Laguna region that straddles Coahuila and its neighbour.

The under-21 side plays the same calendar as the senior team, against the reserve sides of clubs that mirror the first division — San Luis, Querétaro, Pachuca, Puebla, Club León. It is a league where the fixture list is decided elsewhere and the players are auditioning for a promotion up the corridor.

Home is the Estadio Corona, opened as part of a wider development on the edge of Torreón and known by a longer formal name, Estadio Territorio Santos Modelo. It holds 30,000, which is a considerable room for a youth fixture; the noise that fills it on senior matchdays comes from a city of the desert north, closer in temperament to Monterrey than to the capital, where the club is the main thing that carries the region's name beyond it.