For Mexico, an Unlucky Seven

DOHA, Qatar — Of all the soccer playing countries in the world — and there are many — only two can boast of advancing out of the group stage at the last seven World Cups. One of the teams is Brazil. The other may be a tad surprising: Mexico.

After their initial success, the two teams’ fortunes have diverged. Having made its way into the knockout round of every World Cup since 1994, Brazil has won two World Cup finals and played in a third.

Mexico? Each time it reached the round of 16, it promptly lost the next game and went home.

That legacy of fourth-game failure by El Tri, as the national team is known, has created immense pressure and criticism in Mexico, and at times a toxic relationship between the team and the national news media. If any three words haunt Mexican players and fans alike, they are el quinto partido: the fifth game.

“There is always that pressure of people always talking about ‘that fifth game, that fifth game,’ and it gets stuck in your head,” Carlos Vela, a forward who represented Mexico at the 2010 and 2018 World Cups, said in Spanish in an interview earlier this year.

On the field, Vela said, he didn’t think about that hex. But before World Cup matches, especially leading into the knockout round, he said he would hear comments about “the game we can never get past.”

“In everyone’s mind and conversations, it’s always there,” he continued. “I don’t know if it affects us or not, but it’s there and talked about. You go to an interview and it’s always asked.”