Borja's Bicycle Kick at the Azteca and the Crack in Mexican Football's Memory

Borja's Bicycle Kick at the Azteca and the Crack in Mexican Football's Memory

The ball hung in the air, and the Estadio Azteca held its breath.

A Chivas defender cleared it. The ball bounced up, down, up again inside the penalty area, and on the final bounce it stopped falling. Miguel Borja arched backwards, his legs scissoring through empty space, and the pirouette — that is the word the commentators reached for — was so clean that it erased all the chaos that had produced it. I watched that Clásico Nacional from Seoul, before the sky had properly lightened, my coffee going cold because I had forgotten it long before.

What stayed with me was not the moment the ball hit the net. It was another broadcast, a few days later, from a studio in Mexico City.

The goal, and what came after it

América against Chivas is never an ordinary fixture in Liga MX. Mexico's two most heavily supported clubs meet at the Estadio Azteca, and whatever happens across those ninety minutes is remembered longer than it deserves. A beautiful goal here does not belong to the player. It belongs to the collective memory.

Borja arrived from Colombia by way of Atlético Nacional, Palmeiras, Junior and River Plate — a number nine who lives on the small moments inside the box. The Azteca goal was exactly that: born from a scramble, where a defender failed to clear properly and the striker had a fraction of a second to choose between shielding the ball and throwing himself at it. Borja chose to fall backwards. Afterwards, some experts called it one of the finest goals in the history of the Clásico.

Then Hugo Sánchez went on air.

On ESPN's Futbol Picante, the former Mexico striker — who played for Pumas, Atlético Madrid, Real Madrid and, later, América — said that after Borja's bicycle kick, not one journalist, not one commentator, not one analyst had stepped forward to compare the strike with his own overhead kicks. He said it made him a little sad. He added that people in our profession seemed to be frothing at the mouth, or bleeding from it. The line was heavy enough that it exposed more than it accused.

I sat with that clip for a long time. Not because I felt insulted, but because there was something true in it, and something false at the same time.

An act with no metric

The bicycle kick is anti-analytical, and that is where this whole story begins.

Picture the mechanics. The player must rotate his hips, crane his neck, balance on one leg while the other swings above his head, then land on his back or his hip on the grass. The whole sequence lasts about a second, and the point of contact sits outside the striker's direct line of sight — he never sees the ball meet his boot. In the expected-goals models that analysts use every day, a shot like this is assigned a tiny value, mostly because it is rare and because its conversion rate is far lower than a close-range first-time finish.

In other words, the models have no room for the bicycle kick. They register it only once it has already gone in, and when they do, they call it an outlier. An act with no representative metric is an act that professional analysis has not been trained to describe.

That is the first reason I take Hugo Sánchez's complaint seriously. Across five years of watching football from Seoul, I have seen the language of my trade become steadily more technical: pressures after passes, shot values, touches in dangerous areas. Those tools let us speak more precisely about a great many things. They offer nothing to a man flying upside down.

When a piece of play sits outside every model, the writer's reflex is to wait a beat and let someone else speak first. And when nobody speaks first, that silence gets read as denial. It isn't denial. It is confusion.

The man who turned falling into a signature

Still, blaming data alone would ignore the most justified part of Hugo Sánchez's anger.

He has every right to invoke his own name. No figure in Mexican football is as tightly bound to the overhead kick. He was a striker at Pumas, then Atlético Madrid, then Real Madrid, and across that career the art of striking the ball without touching the ground became his thumbprint. He won five Pichichi trophies as La Liga's top scorer, a tally very few forwards in the competition's history have matched, and he did it in an era when Spanish defending had not yet learned to mix zonal and man-marking systems.

Crucially, his bicycle kick was not showmanship. It was a working tool. In a football culture where crosses from wide areas were a primary weapon, having a striker willing to throw himself at any height forced defences to defend space differently. He did not merely score beautifully. He changed how opponents calculated the geometry of their own box.

So when he says nobody compared Borja to him, he is not asking for a compliment. He is asking for a line on the map of memory. And here is the part that will irritate some of my colleagues: on the facts, he is right. It is the explanation he has wrong.

Why nobody said his name

The comparisons that did circulate belonged to a different generation of images: Cristiano Ronaldo, whose overhead kick against Juventus in the Champions League quarter-final on 3 April 2026 remains the most replayed of the modern era, and Raúl Jiménez, whose acrobatic finishes for Mexico sit close at hand in any archive.

Both choices are technically defensible. Both are also entirely predictable in a digital sense.

Ronaldo's goal was recorded in Turin by hundreds of cameras in 4K, and it exists as a nine-second clip that can be looped on any platform. Hugo Sánchez's overhead kicks were recorded in the 1980s, and most survive as faded tape, with dropped frames and a single angle. When a young editor anywhere needs footage to illustrate Borja's strike, it takes three seconds to download Ronaldo's and half a day to find a usable frame of Hugo Sánchez.

The archive decides the comparison, not the merit.

I do not think this is a conspiracy. I think it is a rule of modern memory: what cannot be replayed cannot be repeated. Hugo Sánchez is complaining to a system that has no appeals process, because that system does not run on judgement. It runs on retrieval.

It reminds me of what I have written about VAR. In several pieces I have argued that the space for subjective judgement inside VAR is far larger than people assume, and that the phrase "clear and obvious error" is itself a hazy clause dressed in technical clothing. Football memory works the same way. We talk about legacy as though it were an objective fact, when in truth it is curated, trimmed and rebuilt every day by people sitting in front of a screen.

The gap the spreadsheet leaves

There is a deeper layer here, and it concerns the very people Hugo Sánchez was aiming at.

Over the past decade, football commentary has shifted toward quantitative analysis. That is real progress. It helps us spot teams winning on luck and teams losing undeservedly. It shows fans why a match ended 1-0 with twelve clear chances. But it has also produced a generation of commentators trained to trust only what can be measured, and the bicycle kick is not on that list.

When an action cannot be justified by data, an analyst has two options: describe it in the language of feeling, or say nothing. Many of us choose silence, because emotion was once treated as a weakness of the craft. I know that reflex intimately. In 2026, as a final-year sports journalism student, I wrote about South Korea's 2-0 win over Germany in Kazan — not about pressing or the goalkeeper's error, but about Mesut Özil's eyes as he watched his teammates collapse. A lecturer called it unbalanced and overly literary. It was shared more than two hundred times, and a stranger left a comment thanking me for showing him a match that looked different from the scoreline.

I have kept that comment ever since, not because it flattered me, but because it proved that some things become visible only if you agree to look differently. The bicycle kick is one of them.

A goal confiscated

Within forty-eight hours, Borja's finish had stopped being a goal. It became a debate about the legacy of a man long retired, and about the professionalism of those still working.

I feel sorrier for Borja than for anyone else in this story.

Imagine waking up after the Clásico. You have just scored one of the finest goals in the history of your country's biggest derby. Over the next two days your name appears in the media, but beside it there is always another name: Hugo Sánchez. The question being asked is no longer what Borja did, but who failed to mention whom.

This is a pattern I have seen repeatedly in transfer windows. A single flash of brilliance is enough to change how a player is priced — and for five years I have argued that most of that pricing is a bubble. Paying one hundred million euros for a player with fewer than fifty top-flight matches is a bare-faced gamble, and I have written so more than once. But bubbles are not built from money alone. They are built from short memory. A beautiful overhead kick at the Azteca can lift a striker's commercial value for weeks, just as it can turn a goal into somebody else's property.

Every fall has its own terrain, and on this occasion Borja fell and rose in a place where all the floodlights pointed behind him.

The silence was not rude

Here I part company with the prevailing mood.

In the arguments over Hugo Sánchez's remarks, opinion has split in two: those who say he has earned the right to be acknowledged, and those who say he is making himself the centre of someone else's night. Both camps, I think, are asking the wrong question.

Comparing an in-form striker with a five-time Pichichi winner is not a compliment. It is a verdict. Say that a goal reminds you of Hugo Sánchez and you place it on a scale it cannot survive. No player can carry the weight of a legacy in a single instant, and anyone who has sat in a press room knows that grand comparisons usually end by crushing the person being compared.

There is a cold kindness in not saying it. Not a flawless kindness — it is mixed with laziness, with superficiality, and with a genuine ignorance of Mexican football history. But I do not believe it was a deliberate erasure. I believe it is what happens when a generation of football people is no longer taught to read the history of the sport they cover.

If that is true, the problem is bigger than one legend's anger. It means newsrooms are training writers who only know this week and next week.

In fairness, part of Hugo Sánchez's frustration comes from somewhere deeper than a television set. After retirement, a great player becomes a spectator of his own sport. He sits on the panel, he is paid to speak, but he no longer has the power to change anything. Naming yourself on air is the last remaining way to intervene in a match. It is a lonely position, and it deserves more sympathy than the mockery it has received online.

The storyteller who became an audience

I think of Qatar in 2026, following South Korea and writing about Son Heung-min's tears in a dressing room pushed to the wall. Colleagues called it pink-washing a defeat. I doubted myself for a week. Then I accepted that every writer chooses their own way of staying with this game, and no way is more correct than another.

In Paris in 2026, I sat beside a Korean long jumper eliminated after three consecutive fouls. He wept and could not speak. I did not record him; I just sat there. Afterwards I wrote about a five a.m. training session nobody watched, where he had once jumped further than his official personal best. Mathematics called it failure. I called it the brightest moment of his life.

What I learned from those days applies directly to Hugo Sánchez. The greatness of a moment is not measured by how many people mention it, but by how long it survives inside the person who made it.

The keeper of the door

In 2026, working as a mid-level editor in charge of features, I defended a young reporter who had been cut from an accreditation list because her writing was judged too emotional. She had written about a reserve Mexican goalkeeper who never played a single minute in the tournament but was always the first to embrace his teammates after a win. I read it and saw myself eight years earlier. The piece ran, and it beat the site's usual engagement numbers.

I tell that story here because it connects directly to what is happening around Borja. A newsroom that fails to mention Hugo Sánchez is not a cruel newsroom. It is a newsroom that was never taught that long memory is also a source.

If I had to keep one thing from all this noise, it would be this: a football culture that can only read this week will never understand next week, because every next week is written with the weeks before it.

I began writing in the middle of the World Cup forest, where my voice was only ever a leaf. I have no ambition beyond keeping that leaf aware of the wind. And the wind these days is blowing through a forest where the old trees have started to speak, because they are afraid they have been forgotten.

People call them players. I call them sleepwalkers in studded boots, hunting dreams inside the boundaries of a pitch. Hugo Sánchez was once one of those sleepwalkers, and he flew upside down often enough to believe the sky belonged to him. That he now has to go on television to remind people he once flew is a sadder piece of news than Borja's bicycle kick is a happy one.

Every shirt is a homeland a person chooses to love, and we who write are lodgers in countless homelands. How we treat the old guests in our house of memory will decide whether we are trusted when our own turn comes to be remembered.

We have watched so many falls in recent years that we should know by now: a fall is not an ending, it is the low ground where spring stands up. The only question left is whether we have the patience to remember who stood up there before us.