Jorge Sánchez, Ajax and the Two Years That Made Liga MX Disappear From Europe's Map

One morning in Amsterdam, Jorge Sánchez sat next to Edson Álvarez during a team meal. Álvarez, who had already spent two years in the Netherlands, looked at his phone and said a sentence Sánchez still remembers: “In two years, they have never shown a single Liga MX highlights package.” It was not a criticism. It was quiet astonishment. The silence between two football cultures was visible: the league where they grew up, and the European market where they were trying to make their names. That moment, retold by Sánchez on the podcast Cracks y Mortales, was not about a goal or a dribble. It was about how a football league can become invisible in front of the very players who once starred in it. The stands do not cry because of one defeat; they cry because of what that defeat exposes. Here, what is exposed is not a defeat, but a media gap that has lasted for years.

Ajax did not go to Mexico because of media hype. According to Sánchez, the Dutch club followed him for two years before making a formal offer. They had also sent scouts to watch Edson Álvarez earlier, then Guido Rodríguez, and only then Sánchez. That is a chain of personal references, not a comprehensive scouting programme. European scouts learn about Mexican players through individual connections, not through regular coverage of the league. Sánchez said that in the Netherlands people do not know Liga MX players, do not know the teams, and the league is nearly invisible compared with MLS or the Argentine league. He called Ajax's interest a great achievement, but he also admitted that Mexican players are not properly valued. The story was quickly embraced by Mexican media because it touched a recurring debate: are Mexican players abroad truly recognised by Europe?

The most striking detail is not how much Ajax paid, because the original analysis contains no financial figures. The striking detail is the structure of the story: this is about perception and valuation, not tactics or results. There are no minutes played, no assists, no pressing numbers, no duel data. The absence of data is itself information. Sánchez's market value is being discussed through his journey to Ajax, through two years of scouting, through his own testimony, not through what he has actually done on the pitch. If this were a post-match analysis, we would need at least one concrete metric to verify. But this is a market analysis, built from perception, from a gap in visibility and from comparisons between leagues. For a beat reporter, the first habit is to ask: where is the evidence? The answer lies precisely in the fact that no number appears.

Two years of observation is a tactical statement, even though the article contains no tactical analysis. Ajax did not buy a Liga MX brand. They bought a verified positional profile. When a club spends two years watching a full-back, the bet is not about absolute quality; it is about whether he can adapt from a transition-based league to a structured positional system with a high defensive line and demanding build-up play. The risk is not “Is he good enough?” but “Can he execute a more structured system than the one in which he was scouted?” Liga MX has a different rhythm from the Eredivisie. In Mexico, transition speed and duel-winning ability often decide results. In the Netherlands, a full-back must hold position, join the build-up from deep and handle a high defensive line. The biggest gap is not physical; it is tactical thinking. That is why Ajax's two-year observation was not hesitation; it was a process of verifying a positional profile.

The scouting chain of Álvarez, Guido Rodríguez and Sánchez reveals something deeper: European clubs approach Liga MX through referrals, not through systematic coverage. Knowledge of the league travels through individual players, former acquaintances, and scouts who once worked in Mexico. This is a referral market, not an open market. When a football nation is known only through personal connections, the export pipeline stays narrow and depends on whether the bridge players keep getting signed. If Edson Álvarez had not succeeded in Europe, Ajax might never have looked at Jorge Sánchez. If Guido Rodríguez had not been on the scouting list, the path to Sánchez might have turned elsewhere. This referral model works, but it is fragile. It cannot produce a steady export wave, because it depends on a small number of individuals acting as bridges.

From my perspective following several transfer windows, I believe this story is ultimately about the cost of information. Lack of media exposure forces European clubs to pay extra scouting costs to understand Liga MX. Ajax was willing to pay that cost for two years, and therefore they gained the edge. Clubs that do not pay that cost simply never enter the market. Lack of exposure does not create a price discount. It creates a barrier to entry. The true value of a player does not drop because Dutch television does not show Liga MX; it just becomes harder to access. Based on my experience following matches from Liga MX to the Eredivisie over many years, I notice a gap that scores never show: full-backs from transition-heavy leagues usually need more time than expected to learn high-line defensive positioning. Reading space when the team has the ball, choosing the right moment to push forward, coping under pressing – all of this must be rebuilt. Jorge Sánchez is not an exception. Ajax probably understood that, which is why they spent two years watching before making an offer.

Another key link is Edson Álvarez. He was not just a former teammate. He provided the interpretative frame for Sánchez. When Álvarez said that after two years in the Netherlands he had never seen a Liga MX highlights package, he helped Sánchez turn a personal disappointment into a structural insight. In the podcast, Sánchez moves from “Mexicans are not well valued” to “it is a great achievement that Ajax came for me”. That shift from grievance to gratitude can decide whether an under-the-radar signing integrates or stagnates. The presence of a compatriot who has already adapted is the fastest cultural bridge a club can offer a newcomer. It does not appear on the contract, but it shapes how the new player feels about his environment.

Looking more broadly, Sánchez's story is a classic example of the perception-arbitrage model. Ajax makes money by buying players from under-priced markets, developing them in the Eredivisie, then selling them to the Premier League or the Bundesliga. For this model to work, they need markets that European media rarely covers. Liga MX is one of them. MLS and the Argentine league have stronger brand recognition, while Liga MX has high domestic value but lacks a global distribution system. Therefore, each Sánchez-type deal is both a contract and an experiment in how well a club can exploit information.

The counter-intuitive part is this: the narrative “Liga MX is invisible” is used to claim that Mexican players are undervalued, but in reality, domestic market strength pushes their prices up. Liga MX is a high-revenue domestic market. Mexican clubs have no reason to sell their best local players cheaply. They keep prices high because domestic demand is strong. So European invisibility and high asking prices can coexist. The export bottleneck is not media ignorance alone; it is the narrow-band problem. Only players cheap enough for a European club to gamble on, and attractive enough for the selling club to release, can actually move. If one side falls out of balance, the deal does not happen. This is the point that many debates miss. People often blame European media for not caring, but they forget that player prices are formed by many factors, and domestic purchasing power carries as much weight as foreign attention.

At the same time, we should be careful generalizing from one league and two players. The evidence here comes from the Netherlands, where foreign leagues receive little television attention. Invisibility in the Netherlands does not prove that Liga MX is invisible in Spain, England or Italy, where Mexican football content has a stronger presence. Generalizing to “Europe” is a leap beyond the data. What the story really proves is a distribution problem, not a quality problem. If Liga MX were broadcast in the Netherlands, Sánchez's story might have been different. But the absence of a league from one country's television schedule does not mean that the league is weak, nor that every one of its players is cheap. It is simply a commercial decision about broadcast rights and scheduling.

Here I remember a principle I learned after years of watching football: the silence after the final whistle is the most honest language of a team. In this story there is no final whistle, but there is a similar silence: two years without a single Liga MX highlights package on Dutch television. That silence comes not from the league's quality, but from broadcast rights and scheduling decisions. It is a commercial choice, not a verdict on talent. In 2026, VAR taught me that the truth also needs a confirmation call. Before concluding that Mexican players are undervalued, we should check actual transfer prices alongside measuring broadcast exposure. If a referee cannot make a decision after watching a single angle, a market analyst should not make a conclusion after reading one story about invisibility on television.

The next signal is not how many matches Jorge Sánchez plays for Ajax, but whether Liga MX changes its international rights strategy before the 2026 World Cup. To escape invisibility, the league must sell presence rather than just images. For European clubs, the lesson from Ajax is clear: the Mexican market is not for those who wait for players to appear on TV. It is for those willing to spend two years learning before making an offer. There are decisions that are not wrong, only too late to save a match. Liga MX's television strategy may not be wrong, but if it arrives after a whole generation has grown up in invisibility, it will only explain an opportunity that has already passed. For Jorge Sánchez, that opportunity is opening now. For Liga MX, the door is still there, but time is not on the league's side.