As part of our Language of Soccer World Cup series, The Athletic is speaking to supporters of all 48 nations competing at the 2026 edition to capture their unique football culture, distilled into a single phrase. You can read the articles in one place here.Incondicionales – UnconditionalFew countries have a knottier relationship with the World Cup than Mexico.The tournament will visit for an unprecedented third time this summer. Entire chapters of football history have been written on the turf of the Estadio Azteca, one of the sport’s holy sites. The Mexican national team, known to fans as El Tri, have missed only five World Cups. They have been ever-present since 1990; reliably contributing to the colour and fanfare of the greatest show on earth.That’s the good stuff. The consensus view, however, is that it is outweighed by the bad. “Our relationship with the World Cup is mostly one of heartache,” says Richard Guel, leader of Pancho Villa’s Army (PVA), the largest Mexico national team supporters’ group in the United States.Mexico are up there with the great World Cup underachievers. They have made it to two quarter-finals, both on home soil, the most recent in 1986. Since then, they have never gone beyond the last 16, their campaigns never lasting beyond four matches. For 40 years now, the ‘quinto partido’, the fifth game, has been their white whale, forever out of reach.“Every time we have that opportunity to go further, something happens beyond our control,” says Mexico fan Jaime Diaz. “Take 2014. That was our dream team. We were beating the Netherlands, going through, and all of a sudden everything broke loose. They scored an equaliser and then got a penalty that wasn’t, right at the end.“We always get let down. And we always seem to lose in the funniest ways, the most bad-luck ways, against the most annoying opponents. Argentina, who we like to see as rivals, knocked us out in 2006 and again in 2010. We lost to the U.S. in 2002. I don’t know what we did to the football gods to make them so angry.”Mexico fans react to being knocked out of the 2022 World Cup at the group stage (Karim Jaafar/AFP via Getty Images)Diaz calls it a curse. Plenty in Mexico subscribe to that theory. The failures have been woven into the national psyche. Interestingly, though, they have not engendered fatalism: every new World Cup is seen as a chance for a do-over, a potential staging post on the way to a glorious future.It is no coincidence that one of the most popular tunes at Mexico games is the folk song Cielito Lindo. “Canta y no llores” — sing and don’t cry — goes its indelible refrain, a tiny manifesto for the value of staying positive.