El Clásico Joven: Club América vs Cruz Azul

The Battle for Mexico City

Compared to the decades-old rivalry between América and Chivas, the Clásico Joven against Cruz Azul earned its name almost by accident. In 1980, Mexican broadcaster Gerardo Peña Kegel needed a way to describe the growing América-Cruz Azul fixture on air and simply reached for the word 'joven' — young — to separate it from the country's older Clásico Nacional. 'I just put the adjective there, full stop,' he later recalled. 'It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, I didn't think about it or study it.' The label stuck, even though the rivalry's roots reach back further than the name suggests: the sides first met in a 1963 friendly, which América won 4-0, before their first official league fixture on August 30, 1964, at Estadio 10 de Diciembre in the company town of Ciudad Cooperativa Cruz Azul, Hidalgo — then still home to the cement-mining club before its eventual move to the capital. What makes the Clásico Joven distinct is that, unlike the Clásico Nacional's capital-versus-provinces framing, this is a rivalry contested largely within Mexico City itself, between two of the capital's biggest and most successful clubs: América, Liga MX's most decorated side, and Cruz Azul — nicknamed 'La Máquina,' the Machine — one of the league's most successful teams of the professional era. The fixture has repeatedly produced some of Mexican football's most dramatic knockout football, from Cruz Azul's landmark 4-1 win over defending champions América in the 1971-72 final that first established the rivalry's big-match pedigree, to América's stoppage-time salvation in the Clausura 2013 final. Younger in name only, the Clásico Joven has spent more than half a century proving that a rivalry does not need an old nickname to produce new history.