Liga MX's Top Ten in EA SPORTS FC 27: What That Usage List Is Really Measuring

The first thing that strikes you about the list of the ten most-used Liga MX clubs in EA SPORTS FC 27 is not a name. It is an absence. Pachuca is missing. León is missing. And yet Xolos de Tijuana sits eighth and Santos Laguna tenth. The ranking, attributed to Samuel Rivera, executive producer of gameplay at Electronic Arts, runs América first, then Chivas, Cruz Azul, Monterrey, Tigres, Pumas, Toluca, Xolos, Atlas and Santos Laguna.

At first glance this reads like football news. It is not. It is a consumer-behaviour census. Nobody from the pitch is in it — no xG, no passing network, no pressing design. There is one number: how many people switch on a console and pick a club.

For four decades I have measured clubs elsewhere. Beside the dugout, on the team bus, in hotel lobbies. In 2026 I went live on Facebook from the Abahani Limited Dhaka team bus after a derby win; 4,200 comments came in and I read 300 of them aloud to the players. That day I learned that a supporter's voice is data, not noise. The list in front of me is the next step in that education. Fan choice can now be counted directly — but the person doing the counting is not the club.

Liga MX had been absent from the EA football franchise for several editions, missing since FIFA 22, and returned in FC 27. In football simulation, a league's presence never depends on sporting merit. It depends on licensing. Which publisher holds exclusive rights to which league decides which league appears on screen. The financial terms, the duration and any exclusivity clause of this return have not been disclosed.

The league's communications department has been handed an easy week. Here is a shareable headline: the first results after the comeback. But the questions the list raises have no answers anywhere in it. Which mode does the ranking cover — Ultimate Team card selection, offline Kick Off, or everything combined? What is the timeframe, cumulative since launch or a recent window? How is geography weighted — Mexican domestic usage and diaspora usage counted at the same weight, or separately? Without those answers the list is incomplete as data and convenient as promotion.

What the disclosed figures do reveal is that Liga MX's inherited brand order remains intact. América, Chivas, Cruz Azul and Pumas occupy four of the top six places. Yet the wealthiest, best-organised and most decorated clubs of the past two decades are the northern pair, Monterrey and Tigres, sitting fourth and fifth. Historical identity still out-monetises recent success. The northern duopoly's rise is visible but incomplete: their investment has gone into squad quality and trophies, not into converting a national supporter base.

The lower half of the ten shows a different tier. Toluca seventh — historically decorated, nationally narrow. Xolos eighth — a border club carried by the two-country flow of the San Diego–Tijuana corridor. Atlas ninth, Guadalajara's second club. Santos Laguna tenth, representing the Laguna region. These clubs are demographically dense but geographically contained, a different commercial asset class from the national brands above them.

The ranking maps onto Liga MX's inherited brand hierarchy almost perfectly, not its current competitive hierarchy. Usage share is a stock — accumulated supporter base — not a flow of present form. Its real validation test will be stability: whether the same order returns in the next edition.

And here is the loudest silence. The absence of Pachuca and León is the most information-rich gap in the whole disclosure. Both clubs have won Concacaf Champions Cup titles in recent years; their continental record is clear. Neither appears, while Xolos, without a recent major honour, sits eighth. One reading is blunt: in the digital space, continental trophies convert into almost no reach premium. For any club whose growth strategy is results-led rather than brand-led, that is a warning.

The second reading is methodological. If the ranking tracks Ultimate Team selection share, the causal structure changes entirely. Clubs are then chosen for card availability, chemistry links and the pace-power meta rather than affection. The list stops being a census of love and becomes an accounting of card economy. With the mode undisclosed, that ambiguity cannot be resolved.

One structural detail stands out. Atlas ninth and Santos Laguna tenth are reported to sit under the same ownership group, Grupo Orlegi. Two of the ten most-used Liga MX clubs rest in a single corporate hand — directly relevant to how league-level licensing and commercial revenue are negotiated.

The commercial side is strategic rather than accounting. Licensing income in football games is typically pooled at league level and is small against broadcast and matchday revenue for clubs of this size. The real gain is access to the United States Hispanic market, diaspora engagement and a younger digital audience. For América the advantage compounds: top of usage and the most successful domestic side means the resource gap with mid-tier clubs is likelier to widen than narrow.

In Dhaka, I learned that a fan never simply picks a team. A fan picks an identity. In the game shops of Mohammadpur, teenagers choose clubs by shirt colour and by whichever rival their friends despise. In 2026 I watched France beat Argentina 4-3 in a rented flat in Kazan with 23 Bangladeshi supporters who had pooled their savings; on a night of two Mbappé goals, passports, class and hospitality fused into an identity. That identity now begins on a console screen, before kick-off. The difference is who counts it — and that is no longer anyone on the terraces.

The outside readings are usually two. One camp says this proves the Liga MX return is working. The other says it is self-serving advertising. Both are half true. What nobody is saying is that the only complete dataset of a league's global supporter map now sits with a private publisher. The scoreboard of brand power hangs off the pitch, on somebody's own server. The company that counts also decides which number gets published — publishers tend to disclose the metrics that flatter their partnerships. That is structural selection bias, not conspiracy.

And this list is not, for a Bangladeshi reader, a story about Mexico. Our own league has no licensing presence at all, so we have no such census of our supporter geography. Where the money is, the measuring instrument is. Where it is not, there is only inference and memory.

Three things to watch. First, whether EA publishes a methodology note across the FC 27 cycle; only then does the list move from information to evidence. Second, whether Pachuca and León answer their absence with digital investment. Third, whether Liga MX survives into the next edition — when the licence expires, another exclusivity fight may begin. And one question to leave hanging: when a video game holds the only census of your club's supporters, who is actually writing your club's history?