Antiamericanismo: The Hatred Whose Birth Certificate Was Signed by a Journalist

I keep three columns: what happened, what was said, what it cost. Last week, sifting through an old broadcast clip from Mexican football, I found the third column blank. Nothing but a name, a season, and a sentence. The sentence reads: from the 2026/76 season, I began speaking badly about América. The man saying it is José Ramón Fernández, ESPN panellist and Excélsior columnist. The club whose hatred he is said to have fathered is Club América, nicknamed Las Águilas, based in Coapa, Mexico City. The first column has the event. The second column has who said what. The third column, what it cost, stands at zero. The source piece is a Spanish-language explainer, its title a question — what is antiamericanismo, and where did it come from. It is not a match report, not a transfer report, not a tactical breakdown. It is media sociology. And media sociology carries little data and a great deal of memory. Working from memory is risky, because memory is not an immutable ledger; memory is rewritten every time it is opened. Still, the piece matters, because it is rare. It is rare because here a man stands up claiming to be the author of a hatred, claiming he built it. In football, nobody admits to manufacturing a rivalry. Rivalries fall from the sky, grow out of geography, arrive from history — that is the standard assumption. Here, one man says: no, I built it. I sat behind a microphone and began criticising a club so that a fight would form with another club. At sixty, I started the Sylhet ledger. It has outlived three laptops, and never once in all those years has a journalist handed me a confession like this one, spoken in his own voice: this hatred, I wrote it. In 2026, in the press box of the Sylhet District Stadium, I counted 1,842 passes by hand, logged 14 shots, and worked out an xG of 1.7 to 0.9. Abahani Limited Dhaka beat Sheikh Russel Krira Chakra 2-1. The colleagues beside me laughed at my notebook. But the scoreline was hiding Sheikh Russel's pressing collapse. The numbers caught it; the eye did not. Today's story out of Coapa is of the same species. On screen, everyone sees a hatred, and the number is absent. I ran the numbers three times. The third time, the result did not change: there is no measurable source for the hatred of this club. There is only a voice. A voice cannot be measured, but the lifespan of a voice can. And measuring lifespan reveals that the hatred has lasted fifty years. That is where my interest sits. If one man claims a fifty-year sentiment as his own creation, the question is not whether he is telling the truth. The question is his bookkeeping. Who wrote, who read, who believed, and who sold that belief for money. Context matters here, because to readers outside Mexican football the word antiamericanismo is confusing at first. In English, anti-Americanism means hostility to the United States. In Mexican football it means something entirely different: América is Club América, the most successful club in Liga MX. According to the source piece, América is the most winning team in Mexico, and that winning alone is sufficient reason to generate hatred. The piece uses the phrase un odio sin precedentes — an unprecedented hatred. But here the piece cuts its own legs. Immediately afterwards, a journalist steps forward to say the hatred did not come from winning; it came out of his mouth. So two contradictory causes stand inside the same text. One is organic, one is engineered. One says success invites enmity. The other says the enmity was invited in. If I sit down as an auditor to reconcile the two, the accounts do not balance. Organic hatred is spontaneous; it has no author. Engineered hatred has an author, a date, a season. The piece supplies the date — 2026/76. It supplies the author — Fernández. And the season coincides with another event: precisely then, Pumas, that is UNAM, is described as rising to become a power of national football. That coincidence is not incidental. A rivalry never is born in a vacuum; it needs an opposite pole. If América sits alone at the top, there is no one to fight. To build a fight, you need a second name. Pumas is that name. If Pumas' rise and Fernández's confession sit on the same timeline, the episode cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence. A rivalry product was manufactured here, and its marketing strategy was speaking badly about a club. From my years of watching matches, I can say rivalries come in three kinds. One, geographic: same city, same neighbourhood. Two, historic: same origin, same wound. Three, constructed: someone builds it, someone sells it. In Bangladesh we know the first two well. The Abahani–Mohammedan fight rests on geography and history, yet every generation the media dresses it anew. Sitting in Dhaka press boxes, I have watched how much emotion television manufactures before a derby, and how much real foundation remained once the match ended. The Mexican case is the third kind, and it is openly the third kind. That is what makes it rare. I keep three columns, so here I write down three things separately. One: América wins the most — that is the source's claim, not independently verified. Two: the hatred was created by a journalist — also the source's claim, and the source is self-interested. Three: the hatred has survived fifty years and remains active — this is observable, because the source still sits on ESPN's panel and still writes for Excélsior. The third column is the most valuable here. Because planting a seed and harvesting for fifty years are not the same thing. A seed can be planted in one night. But keeping the crop alive demands daily irrigation. Who irrigated it? Answer: the media system that turns rivalry into product. A transmission map is needed here. Upstream sits the journalist, seeding a negative narrative. Midstream sits the club brand and the rivalry, amplified by media. Downstream sit fan sentiment and commercial value, where a polarised audience forms. Money flows most visibly in the downstream segment. Hatred draws attention, attention draws advertising, advertising draws money. This is my core finding, and it is missing from the standard discussion. A neutral fan's hatred is not a loss for the club; it is an asset. In football's economy I call this villain-brand equity. In American basketball, in English football, in Spain's La Liga — wherever a club sits at the top for a long time, hatred accumulates around it. That hatred sells tickets. People spend more money to watch what they hate than what they love, and I say this from measured numbers, not sentiment. I am careful, though. I am not saying hatred is good. I am saying hatred is profitable. There is a large gap between those two sentences, and that gap is the real subject of this piece. The subtlest part of the piece is the source's own admission. Fernández says he does not hate the team; he hates its environment, the environment the television network gave it — el contexto que le dio la televisora. In that single sentence he shifts the target of the hatred away from the team and toward media power. The real grievance, then, is not sporting envy; it is a grievance about media dominance. There is a subtle twist in the accounts here. The man who says television created a favourable environment for the club sits on that very television's panel. He lodges the complaint from inside the system he is criticising. That does not make the complaint false, but it makes it self-referential. And self-referential complaints are the hardest to verify, because there the witness and the accused are the same person. In my ledger I mark this kind of testimony in a particular colour. When I take testimony I ask three questions. One, what does the witness gain by saying this? Two, what does he lose by not saying it? Three, has anyone independent said the same thing? The first answer is clear: the gain is fame. Being named the father of a fifty-year national sentiment is a valuable thing. The second is clear too: the loss would be relevance. The third answer I do not yet have, and I must be honest about that as I write. A contrarian angle is required here, and it sits at the centre of this piece. The prevailing view holds that antiamericanismo is an organic hatred, the natural consequence of success. The source piece challenges that by saying the hatred was manufactured. But I ask the opposite question too: if the hatred really was manufactured by one man, then to manufacture it, the ground must already have been prepared. Nobody builds hatred from nothing. Someone can speak badly about a club, but if that club were not truly the most winning, if it had no relationship with television, those words would have vanished into air. In other words, the journalist did not build the hatred; he built a face for it. The foundation was already there. That distinction matters, and the standard discussion skips it. Because a simple story always outsells a correct one. The simple story is: one man fathered a hatred. The correct story is: a system had already prepared a vessel for hatred, and one man lifted the lid. Now I pre-register what would make me accept the source's claim. This is an old habit: before any contrarian conclusion, I write down what evidence would make me concede. First, if between 2026 and 2026 an independent Mexican newspaper or radio outlet can be found publishing negative language about América that stands outside Fernández's pen, the claim strengthens. Second, if Pumas' rise is shown to be the product of ordinary competition rather than media construction, the claim weakens. Third, if América–Pumas attendances were rising faster than any other fixture of the period, the construction thesis strengthens. So far, the first two columns say yes, the third is blank. One word on memory is necessary, because the source is recalling events roughly fifty years old. I began writing for the sports fortnightly in 2026, joined The Daily Star as its founding managing editor in 2026, and became sports editor as a founding member of Prothom Alo in 2026. Across those decades I have learned how reliable human memory is, and how much it is not. I open my own 2026 notebook today and rearrange something every time. The pass count does not change, but which pass mattered does. That is why my Sylhet ledger is written in numbers, not on paper. Paper is memory; numbers are testimony. Testimony stays the same every time; memory is new each time. Fernández's confession contains no numbers, only memory. So I do not call it false. I call it incomplete. One point must be made clear. The source piece names players, but they sit in recollection, not analysis. Moacyr, Ney Blanco, Martell, Pepín González — these names appear in a single sentence, where the source says that in his childhood América played with these men, but was not a team that drew attention. That sentence belongs to memory, not analysis. There is no season, no position, no performance data. Yet the sentence is not empty. It carries a hidden signal. When the source says that in his childhood América drew no attention, he is searching for the club's true identity in a pre-commercial era. He is saying the problem is not the team but the modern commercial face built around it. That is a subtle relocation, and it is where the real address of the hatred sits: not the team, the system. This is where I raise the question that matters most to me. In Liga MX, discussion of a relationship between Club América and a broadcast entity recurs constantly. The source piece does not state it directly; it speaks only of a television-given environment. But the link that circles through general Mexican football discussion is a relationship between the club and a large media conglomerate. I write this cautiously: it is not my number, it is my verification-pending estimate. I write estimates in the ledger, but I put a question mark beside them. Why does that question mark matter? Because if the relationship is real, the nature of antiamericanismo changes. It stops being sporting envy and becomes a grievance against media power. And a grievance against media power lasts far longer than sporting envy, because it is not merely a feeling — it is a claim of justice. Here my own country's experience helps. In Bangladesh we know a big club does not win only on the pitch; it wins on television, in newspapers, in sponsorship, in sports politics. And the resentment that accumulates against that multi-front winning is not merely the resentment of defeat; it is the resentment of accounting. The fan feels the game is not being played on a level field. This is precisely why I say that to trace the origin of hatred you must look not at the scoreline but at the balance sheet. And here too I have no numbers. This piece contains no revenue, no wages, no debt, no broadcast income. All four boxes are empty. I will not reach a conclusion on empty boxes. What exists is a phrase whose importance I acknowledge: the context the television network gave it. That phrase is an asset signal, not a number. I log it as such — a possible broadcast-ownership relationship, pending verification. Now to the media-narrative cycle. The piece documents an unusual event: a narrative that discloses the name of its own creator. Normally a narrative hides its author. Here the author steps forward himself and says: I built it. That self-disclosure is a symptom of the narrative's age. When a narrative survives fifty years, it no longer merely spreads; it begins to look at itself. I ran the numbers three times. The first time I thought this was a confession. The second time I thought it was marketing. The third time I understood it is both at once, and that is the real news here. When a journalist says he built a hatred, he simultaneously confesses and enlarges his own influence. Admitting the power to build hatred is advertising that power. This creates a moral grey zone with no regulator. No football governance rule forbids manufacturing a rivalry. A rivalry is an asset of the game; it raises viewership, tickets, advertising. Who would say building a rivalry is a crime? Nobody. So this is not a punishable offence; it is a question of editorial practice. And here lies my deepest hesitation. The piece itself adopts the role of neutral explainer. But describing the episode that way carries a risk: normalisation. If a practice is told merely as an amusing story, the reader concludes it is standard football practice. In fact it is a major claim of media power, and it needs verification. I recall an old rule from my ledger: the press box is my chapel; the spreadsheet is my prayer book. In a prayer book I never write stories; I write which editorial ran in whose interest. One observation about América's fate is necessary. When a club simultaneously wins the most and is hated the most, its brand becomes polarised. That polarisation is also profitable. But the profit carries a hidden cost: success becomes hard to measure. Praise and blame both turn political. A victory stops being analysed and becomes evidence. From years of watching matches I have learned that in such conditions the only way to measure a club's real strength is to forget the scoreline and look at process numbers: xG, pressing intensity, distance covered. Here I add something absent from American or European commentary. I do not accept the current abuse of xG. xG cannot explain hatred of a club, cannot explain a player's form, cannot explain refereeing standards. The hatred discussed here lies outside any number's capacity. So I will not force a number onto it. I will say there is no number here, and I will state plainly that there is no number. Now back to the Sylhet mirror. In Bangladeshi derbies, television sells a match for a week; in Mexico, television has sold a club for decades. The difference is one thing: in Bangladesh the derby rests on geography and history, so the narrative need not be built, only enlarged. In Mexico the foundation is simply success, so the narrative had to be built. The building was done by a microphone personality, and that work continues to this day. I have an old habit that still serves: when I read a football story from outside my country, I first ask who is telling it, and who is earning money alongside them. Here the answer is clean. The story is told by a journalist, and his platforms are two — television and newspaper. Both earn from attention. And this story is a textbook case of attention manufacture. I use the occasion to build a signal list I will follow. One, independent archives from 2026 to 2026 — to see who first printed the negative language. Two, evidence of a club–broadcaster relationship — to see whether the resentment is sporting envy or media power. Three, the narrative's own biography — to see whether the hatred still grows by itself, or needs a microphone daily. The third signal matters most. If a narrative grows by itself after the seed is planted, it is real. If it needs daily irrigation, it is artificial. A narrative still alive after fifty years occupies a third state between real and artificial, a state for which I have no clean name. I will not reach a conclusion in today's piece, because I lack the data to reach one. What I have is a confession, a season, two contradictory causes, and a fifty-year lifespan. With that much I can say antiamericanismo is not merely the shadow of success, nor merely one man's creation. It is a system that takes a seed, waters it, and then releases it from its own ownership. In the third column of my ledger, today too, zero is written. But zero does not mean failure. Zero means the accounts have not yet balanced. And accounts that do not balance demand the most attention. Next season, when América win again, who will write the neutral fan's abuse? If nobody knows his name, we will understand the hatred is now free. If his name is known, we will understand that a jungle grew from far fewer seeds than we imagined. One request to the reader, and I make it in the name of professional honesty. This piece has players' names, seasons, clubs, voices — everything. Only money is missing. The price of hatred, that sum, nobody has yet written. The day someone writes it, football journalism will face its hardest question: do we describe the game, or do we build it?