FIFA World Cup 2026 in Mexico: Where communities build soccer pitches anywhere space permits

MONTERREY, Mexico: Across World Cup co-host Mexico, soccer pitches are laid out wherever communities can find the space. On the edges of towns, on highway underpasses, and even in a volcano crater, spaces are cleared that allow the young and the old to share in the dream of the beautiful game. In an impoverished neighborhood in Monterrey in northern Mexico, 14-year-old Humberto Guadalupe, called "Messi" by friends and family, spends his weekends on the community's only soccer field, surrounded by abandoned cars and dirt roads. Just like the legendary Argentine player who inspired his nickname, he dreams of becoming a professional player one day, encouraged by his grandmother. "One way or another, it's going to happen," he says. "Even when we lose a match, we keep our heads up." To the south, in a rural district on the outskirts of Mexico City, families arrive by car, motorcycle, bicycle and on foot to watch matches at the "Field of the Gods," a soccer pitch inside the crater of the extinct Teoca Volcano. Mist moves between pine trees and fruit orchards that frame the pitch in the former crater, nearly 700 meters (2,300 ft) above the sprawling capital. Built by the community more than 60 years ago, it is used by amateur local teams on Sundays. In nearby Xochimilco, soccer players ride in traditional "trajinera" wooden boats along canals and cross chinampas, the ancient agricultural plots or floating gardens that helped sustain the Aztec capital centuries ago. They are heading to play on some of Mexico City's last remaining natural grass pitches. Located inside a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the pitches are an important social hub, but their creation can be damaging to the area's ecology and habitat of the endangered axolotl salamander, scientists say. Though separated by landscape and distance, these matches share the same rhythm: communities building spaces around soccer in places shaped by hardship, geography and memory. Reuters photographer Raquel Cunha spent some three months taking photos of amateur soccer matches across Mexico City and beyond; she mostly worked on Sundays, when players are out in force. She selected most of her subjects by closely examining the city on map apps and then choosing a shortlist of 15 to photograph with a drone. Of these, she chose two in the city plus one in the industrial north to also photograph on the ground, with contrasting environments: gritty Monterrey; a green, mountainous suburb; and a historic neighborhood of canals.