It took one minute for me to pass through Mexican border control. Getting Fifa accreditation takes an hour and 45. \u201cDon\u2019t lose it,\u201d they say as they hand you the plastic pass. \u201cThere are no replacements.\u201d<\/p>\n
Can this be true? I lost one of these accreditations during Brazil 2014, when a guy stole my bag from a hotel bar in Recife. When I went to the police station, they explained: \u201cIn Brazil, we have many … Peruvians.\u201d They did at least give me a police report that persuaded Fifa to print me a new accreditation.<\/p>\n
On the way out of the stadium you see wooden fences where graffiti has been painted over in green paint, but not quite enough of it. The phone helps translate still-visible slogans. \u201cMundial Del Despojo\u201d \u2013 World Cup of Dispossession. \u201cHermanx \u2013 Lucha esta tambi\u00e9n es tu lucha\u201d \u2013 Brothers\/Sisters x \u2013 This is your fight too. \u201cF**k FIFA\u201d, \u201cFIFA Go Home\u201d. Those are easier.<\/p>\n
It takes half an hour in an Uber to reach the central neighbourhood of Coyoac\u00e1n via the complicated route our driver has chosen. Our destination is the house where the exiled Leon Trotsky lived and, in 1940, was assassinated. It\u2019s now a museum dedicated to Trotsky and to the rights of asylum seekers everywhere.<\/p>\n
Trotsky was the most famous of the political refugees who flooded from Europe to Mexico in the late 1930s. Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera allowed him to stay at their house in Coyo\u00e1can until Rivera eventually kicked Trotsky out, supposedly after he had an affair with Kahlo. Trotsky moved all of two blocks away to the house where I now stand.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/O5OM5KUW5L4FFQI4EIC5WA7SYU.jpg\")
The home exiled Leon Trotsky lived in, now a museum, in Mexico City\u2019s Coyoac\u00e1n neighborhood. Photograph: Adrian Wilson\/New York Times <\/p>\n
The museum has pictures of Trotsky in many guises \u2013 student, poet, prisoner, revolutionary, general, family man, sportsman, intellectual. There are films of him reading out speeches \u2013 Trotsky was an early adopter of new media technologies \u2013 but somehow his expressiveness comes across better in the still photos, the range of gestures showing the passion that still animated the snowy-haired exile.<\/p>\n
The house has been preserved as it was on the day he was murdered. The kitchen with its gas cooker and metal sink, the diningroom with its yellow tablecloth and chairs. The tiny doorways you have to duck to get through. The bedroom, with bullet holes still riddling the wall from the first, failed, assassination attempt. The study, with its big map of Mexico on the wall.<\/p>\n
I recognise the map from one of the photos I\u2019ve just seen in the museum. In that photo, the papers littering the table were spattered with thin sprays of blood. It was in this room that Ram\u00f3n Mercader drove the sharp point of an ice axe into the back of the unsuspecting Trotsky\u2019s head.<\/p>\n
Victor Serge, an old comrade of Trotsky\u2019s, was then in Marseille trying to arrange his own escape from Europe. Reading the newspaper reports of the murder, he understood immediately that Stalin had ordered the hit: \u201c[Mercader] said he struck Trotsky in an access of indignation at the moment when the latter \u2018proposed that he go to the USSR to carry out acts of sabotage\u2019. This declaration constitutes one of the signatures on the crime, since in its flagrant absurdity it is in strict conformity with Stalin\u2019s directives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Serge would live in Mexico City from 1941 until his death in 1947, aged just 56. Cut off from the world that had given their lives meaning, many of the exiles died young, or sank into depression and bitterness. <\/p>\n
Another Coyoac\u00e1n resident was Otto R\u00fchle, a German socialist whose hatred of nazism was almost equalled in intensity by his contempt for the United States. \u201cThey\u2019re totalitarians without knowing it,\u201d he once ranted to Serge. \u201cMillions of people read the Reader\u2019s Digest, that revolting crap, intellectual nourishment of the lowest order. It kills the intelligence. Same newspapers, same radios, same soaps, same cities \u2013 it all ends up by producing standardised men who carry the totalitarianism of weak, emasculated beings in their veins … The United States is closer than any country in the world to a totalitarianism of ants.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his diary, Serge wrestled with the defeat of the revolutionary cause to which he had devoted his life. \u201cProblems no longer have the same beautiful simplicity of the past. It was easy to live on antinomies like \u2018socialism or capitalism\u2019. We are now in the midst of a total transformation of the world, in a shifting chaos, surrounded by falsifications, complex facts, uncertain ideas, transitory interests and violence. How to find one\u2019s place?\u201d R\u00fchle told Serge he\u2019d \u201clove to live long enough to see what will happen next\u201d. Would it console him to know how little he\u2019s missed?<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/KC27CR7VSVIGDUD7VDCDCVTNBU.jpg\")
A member of the ground staff at the Azteca stadium in Mexico City on Thursday. Photograph: Carl Recine\/Getty Images <\/p>\n
I try to go to the Museum of Anthropology, get frustrated by the traffic and the Uber driver taking another absurdly circuitous route, decide it\u2019s too late to go there anyway, go home instead. There I read about the huge teachers\u2019 strikes that have blocked some of the main avenues of the city. <\/p>\n
Some junior teachers in Mexico earn as little as \u20ac330 a month and the protesters want a 13 per cent increase. Earlier a group of them had marched on the Azteca. I was gone before they arrived there, and was only vaguely aware of the strikes, which previously had been concentrated around the main square of Z\u00f3calo, miles to the north. So this is why the drivers were taking weird routes.<\/p>\n
In the evening a colleague, David Sneyd of the42.ie<\/a>, is meeting some people from Los San Patricios GAA club, for now still the only GAA<\/a> club in Mexico, and I go along for some tacos. There are six people from the club, two Irish and four Mexicans.<\/p>\n It\u2019s interesting to hear the Mexicans telling David about how they ended up joining a club in a sport none of them had ever heard of. The reasons all come down to the same thing: the desire for human connection. Even in a city of 25 million people, joining a team is one of the only sure ways to find friends. People speak honestly and listen respectfully. Is this what an AA meeting is like? I never thought of myself as a group therapy guy but maybe I could get into it. <\/p>\n We know that when you boil it right down this is what football is for \u2013 bringing people together. Even Gianni Infantino\u2019s hashtag, #FootballUnitestheWorld, is nodding to this. Except his idea of uniting the world is getting all the richest people in the world together and charging them $1,000 for a ticket so they can post pictures of themselves there with famous influencers in the background.<\/p>\n Our friends from Los Patricios say that nobody they know, Irish or Mexican, has a ticket to any of the games here. There must be a lot of teachers who love El Tri, but who\u2019s paying three month\u2019s salary for a ticket?<\/p>\n Infantino sees his pricing policy as the natural order of things \u2212 if you\u2019re not rich, then this \u201cpremium\u201d event is simply not for you. He forgets or ignores that by doing this, he has turned the World Cup into an international symbol of exploitation and extraction. The Mexican government has accused the protesting teachers of trying to embarrass Mexico on the international stage, but if the strikes do manage to cause havoc around Thursday\u2019s kick-off, many here in Mexico\u2019s capital will be cheering them all the way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier we had been complaining about the weather but now that we\u2019re standing in a forever queue it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2956,53114,61,60,212078,2628,112,4018],"class_list":["post-494094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-fifa","tag-gianni-infantino","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kevin-de-bruyne","tag-mexico","tag-sports","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}