The Hatred That Began With One Pen: Club América's 'Antiamericanismo' and Fifty Years of Manufactured Football Narrative

On an ESPN panel broadcast earlier this year, a sixty-something journalist laughed and said, "I started speaking badly about América from 75/76." He then added that as a boy he watched Moacyr, Ney Blanco, Martell and Pepín González, but that América "was not a team that drew attention." The rest of the panel laughed. Nobody stopped him. The camera cut to commercial.

For me, those ten seconds were the most important replay of the entire story. A journalist was openly admitting, on camera, that he had built a rivalry himself — the phenomenon Mexican football calls antiamericanismo, the unusually intense hostility of neutral fans toward Club América, Liga MX's most decorated club. The question is no longer about the club's trophy count. The question is about narrative construction. If someone planted the hatred with his own hand, that hatred can no longer be called a natural emotion; it becomes an editorial decision.

I launched Referee's Eye from a small studio in Khulna in 2026, after eighteen years behind a microphone. That year I reviewed sixteen Confederations Cup matches — forty-two yellow cards, three reds, five penalties, each logged with its minute and law number. Chile 0–1 Germany in the final, refereed by Milorad Mažić. That file later became the baseline for everything I judge. I apply the same method here, because this is not a story about football on the pitch. It is a story about football as narrative — and narratives have replays too.

First, the term needs cleaning. Antiamericanismo here is not the geopolitical idea of anti-Americanism. It is an internal Mexican football phenomenon: the durable, almost ritual hostility of neutral spectators toward the institution in Coapa, Mexico City, nicknamed Las Águilas. In sociology it is a villain brand. In football language, it is a club whose shirt alone makes the opposing stand louder.

América's profile is simple: the most winning team in Mexican history. The article's argument is equally simple — that volume of winning is sufficient reason to generate hatred. The first gap opens right there. Real Madrid in Spain, Juventus in Italy, Boca Juniors in Argentina — they all win and they are all disliked, yet nowhere else is the intensity narrated in the same language for fifty consecutive years. Winning is one cause. It is not the only one.

The article gestures at something it never states directly: "the context the television network gave it." For Mexican readers this points to the long association between Club América and the broadcaster Grupo Televisa. That link is not named in the source interview, so I treat it as external context, not verified fact. Even so, the hint carries the most analytical weight, because the journalist says he does not hate the team — he hates "its environment and the context the television network gave it."

The date matters. 2026/76. That was precisely when Pumas (UNAM) was rising as a national power. The América–Pumas axis became the natural fault line — and a manufactured rivalry was lowered into it. Not geographic, not historic, but broadcast-driven: a clásico by editorial design.

José Ramón Fernández calls himself the father, the institution, the rector of this movement. He is an ESPN panelist and an Excélsior columnist. The man who seeded the narrative is still part of the loudest machine that carries it. That is not coincidence; it is structural.

Now the core. Two competing causal paths exist here, and the article never resolves them — which is its greatest analytical strength.

Path one: organic envy. The team wins, so everyone dislikes it. Football's oldest rule, what a referee's notebook calls ordinary pressure.

Path two: engineered narrative. The journalist admits he deliberately began criticising América from 2026/76 to build a rivalry with Pumas. This admission is directly quoted, so its evidentiary weight is higher.

Both paths cannot be fully true at once. If the hatred was manufactured, then "hatred because of winning" is at best a partial account — the rest is construction.

That is where I went back to the 2026 frames. I built a World Cup VAR database from all sixty-four matches in Russia. France versus Australia, 58th minute, referee Andrés Cunha awarded the first World Cup VAR penalty for Josh Risdon's handball on Antoine Griezmann. Across the tournament I logged twenty-nine penalties, twelve own goals and twenty-nine VAR reviews. I watched every controversial incident three times and cross-checked against my 2026 Confederations Cup file. The finding was striking: broadcast narratives almost always skip the wording of Law 12, because narrative language is simple and legal language is not.

The same disease appears in media-built rivalries. I do not publish an opinion without precedent; I imposed that rule on myself in 2026 — no column until at least three prior similar incidents have been checked. So in this case the precedent file asks one question: how many independent pieces of evidence support the claim?

The honest answer is one. A single journalist, working from memory, is taking credit for an event fifty years old. Memory is not precise at that distance, and human nature is generous about credit — especially in a profession where attention is the currency. The phrase "the single father of antiamericanismo" is usable in analysis, not as final truth. The database does not shout; it waits for you to ask the right question.

The deepest contradiction sits here. In one breath the journalist says the team is a winner, that he does not hate the team, that he hates its environment. The apparent cause is winning; the actual grievance is broadcast power. If that distinction holds, antiamericanismo is not a story of sporting envy at all. It is a story of resentment against media power — and that resentment is far more legitimate, because it raises a real question: how does a network tied to a club broadcast that club's matches neutrally?

My own trade is useful here. A referee knows that conflicts of interest go unmonitored unless they are declared, and that unmonitored decisions lose credibility. Football has rules for that. But the grey zone outside the rules — the boundary between editorial freedom and manufactured narrative — has no law, no VAR, no sanctions framework. Nobody is fined for building a rivalry, because rivalries sell.

The transmission path is simple. Upstream, a journalist seeds the narrative. Midstream, the América–Pumas axis intensifies it. Downstream, fan sentiment polarises. At the end, broadcasters and the league profit from the attention economy. Hatred is a product, and one of its suppliers is still supplying.

This is my Khulna lesson. In Khulna I learned that a new feed can change the old rules. If we watch only América's shirt and América's results, the hatred looks natural. When we see which camera is broadcasting from where, who sits on the panel, which editorial decision created a rivalry — the picture changes. Change the feed and the rules change.

Agenda-setting theory names this process: media does not merely report, it decides which topics matter and which emotions are speakable. Fifty years of the same framing, in the same language, casting the same club as villain, means the emotion no longer looks constructed to a new generation. It looks natural. The narrative eventually becomes independent of its own creator — self-sustaining.

Now the counter-intuitive turn. When the crowd says penalty, I look for the angle the crowd cannot see.

First, it is a mistake to assume José Ramón Fernández created antiamericanismo alone. Sociologically, such emotions never come from a single source. Centralisation in 1970s Mexican football, the broadcast dominance of the capital's clubs, Pumas' university identity and class division — the ground was already prepared. The journalist planted a seed; he did not make the soil. He is claiming credit, and that too is a form of self-branding.

Second, the economics of hatred are perverse. América is disliked, and América draws viewers. A villain brand raises attention, ticket demand and advertising rates. The club may profit from the very hostility aimed at it — and that is plausibly why no authority has ever tried to dismantle the narrative. Who erases their own villainy when villainy sells?

Third, there is a possibility nobody wants to raise: perhaps the confession itself is part of the story. An ageing panelist, protecting fifty years of relevance, may be inflating his role in an interview. I am not asserting this. I am obliged to leave room for it, because evidence quality and witness motive must be checked together. I trust the replay, the rulebook and the long walk to the monitor — not the statement.

One thing I know and one thing I do not. I know the narrative has run for fifty years, and that it has now begun to recognise itself — that part is new. I do not know whether the events of 2026/76 truly followed one man's intention, or whether someone later turned them into his own story.

What to watch next is clear. First, independent archives of Mexican football media from 2026 to 2026 need to be searched; if contemporaneous writing corroborates the claim, its weight rises, and if not, it falls. Second, verifiable reporting on the club–broadcaster relationship is needed; if it arrives, antiamericanismo must be re-read as a grievance about media power rather than sporting envy. Third, the language of ESPN and Excélsior must be monitored, because the man who once seeded the narrative will reveal in his own sentences who now controls it.

In my file this entry will be called editorial interference, and it belongs in the precedent list. A referee's rule applies: hatred written by someone is never spontaneous — it only grows old enough that everyone mistakes it for nature.