Why Are They Called Chivas? The Insults Behind Liga MX Nicknames

Mexican clubs are almost never called by their names. They are called las Chivas, las Águilas, la Máquina, los Tuzos, and if you do not know which is which, half of every football conversation is missing.

The useful thing is not the list. It is that a surprising number of these started as jokes at the club’s expense, and the club kept them.

Some were insults, some were day jobs, some were the shirt

Broadly there are three sources, and knowing which one you are dealing with tells you how safe the nickname is to use.¹

The dictionary knew this already

The word for nickname is apodo, and the definition is quietly damning: a name used for someone ironically or familiarly, which generally refers to some defect or quality of theirs.²

That is not how English defines a nickname. In Spanish the flaw is written into the word, which is why so many of these started as mockery and why almost none of them sound like branding. A club with an apodo has been named by other people.

The people themselves are la afición — the supporters collectively — and an individual is aficionado, someone with a real inclination toward something.³ Not a fan in the shouting sense. Someone with a taste for it.

Chivas started as a newspaper insult

The story usually told: in 1948, after Guadalajara lost to Tampico, Atlas fans sneered that the red-and-whites had run around the pitch como chivas — like goats. A reporter put the jibe in his match report, and it stuck hard enough that the club never got rid of it.¹

Guadalajara did the only sensible thing available and adopted it completely. Today the club is el Rebaño Sagrado — the sacred flock — which is an insult that has been promoted twice.

The word itself is ordinary. A chiva is a female goat, and in the plural it also means somebody’s belongings, a pile of odds and ends of little value.⁴ Both senses were available to whoever made the joke, and neither was flattering.

La Máquina, and the ones that came from work

La Máquina is Cruz Azul, and it is layered. The club belongs to a cement cooperative, which is where cementeros comes from. The Máquina part was popularised in the 1970s, when the team won five championships and ran like one — a system of parts doing a job, which is precisely the dictionary sense.⁵¹

Los Tuzos is Pachuca, and it is the same logic pointed at a different industry. Pachuca is a mining town. A tuza is a small burrowing rodent that wrecks farmland by digging holes and tunnels through it,⁶ and comparing men who work underground to the animal that lives underground is not subtle, but it is affectionate.

Los Rayados is the flattest of the lot: Monterrey wear stripes, and have since the 1950s.¹

Xolos is the one that is genuinely a dog

Tijuana is the exception, because the nickname is not a nickname. The club’s registered name is Club Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente — the dog is in the title.

A xoloitzcuintle is the Mexican hairless dog, an ancient breed, and the dictionary even gives you the pronunciation: sholoitscuíntle.⁷ Everyone shortens it to Xolos, including the club.

If you want the animal rather than the football team, the Xolo has its own long history, and it is older than anything else on this page by several thousand years.

Using one without starting something

For the broader survey of fan shorthand including the national team, Mexican soccer nicknames covers the whole set, and the América versus Chivas rivalry has its own vocabulary that this page deliberately stays out of.

Eighteen clubs, and most of the names came from somebody being rude about them in print. Once you hear that, the whole vocabulary gets easier to remember.⁸

Hero photo by ProtoplasmaKid, CC BY-SA 4.0.