Who Replaces Andrés Fassi at Juárez FC? A Restructuring Amid a Zero-Point Crisis

I still remember the July night in 2026 when Diego Godin sank to the turf in Kazan, tears rolling down the face of a man who had fought for twelve years under a sky-blue shirt. That night I wrote that his tears weighed more than the ball. It was only when I read the reports about FC Juárez that I understood something else: some defeats never produce tears, because they do not happen in a single moment. They happen quietly, in meeting rooms, where people talk about structure instead of passes. In Ciudad Juárez, a city pressed against the border between Mexico and the United States, football is not a luxury. It is the breathing rhythm of a community that lives in a constant sense of movement. The stadium bears the name of Benito Juárez, the first president of an independent Mexico, and it has watched generations of players pass through. Perhaps it has never been this quiet. Eight matches, zero points. That is the record FC Juárez carried through the opening stretch of the season, and it turned the club from a hope of the borderlands into an unanswered question. In the middle of that storm, one name became the centre of every conversation: Andrés Fassi, the club's sporting president. According to RÉCORD, citing contributor Juan Carlos Ibarrarán, Fassi's seat is shaking badly. The name most often mentioned as a possible replacement is Ramón Planes, a sporting executive with extensive experience across different football structures in Europe. The club has issued official statements about the process, but the substance of the succession remains open. At first glance, this looks like just another change in the boardroom — routine business in football. Look closer, and it becomes a door into larger questions about how football is run, about the relationship between those who decide and those who execute, and about how one football culture tries to learn from another. FC Juárez is not an old power of Mexican football. The club was born in the 2010s, as the city of Juárez sought to rebuild its image after turbulent years. For a city like that, a top-flight team means more than sport. It is a symbol of revival, an affirmation that there are still things worth hoping for. Every defeat, then, does not stop at a loss of points; it is a scratch on the pride of a whole community. To understand the story properly, it must be placed against the reality of Mexican football, where Liga MX operates by its own logic. It is a league split into short tournaments, where a season can be redefined within weeks. The pressure for results arrives faster here than almost anywhere else. A coach can lose his job after five games; a president can be replaced after a single disappointing stretch. Patience is a luxury not every club can afford. In such a league, the role of the sporting president becomes a vital link. In the European model, this figure does not coach players directly but owns the long-term vision: defining the playing style, building the recruitment profile, choosing and evaluating coaches, and ensuring that every decision at first-team level fits a single strategy. This is the person who stands between the boardroom and the pitch, between budget and tactics, between ambition and reality. When FC Juárez is reported to be pursuing Ramón Planes, what the club is trying to do means more than a simple personnel decision. It is an attempt to import a model — the continental sporting-director model, in which playing identity is defined from above rather than by the short-term decisions of a coaching staff. The order of events says a great deal about governance thinking. At FC Juárez, the change on the bench came first. That means the current team is led by a man chosen amid crisis, with the short-term goal of halting the free fall. Now, with a new sporting president potentially arriving, that same team faces a probable second coaching appointment — this time made by someone with a longer-term vision, but mid-season, when time and resources have already been eroded. This is what analysts often call the "two-chefs problem". When a sporting director and a head coach coexist, the question is not who is better, but who holds the final word on squad profiles and playing style. If that boundary is clear, the model runs smoothly. If not, it becomes a quiet war for power, in which players pay the price and results on the pitch mirror the chaos in the boardroom. I have seen this more than once in my years covering football. Based on my experience following matches and transfers across many leagues, the clubs that succeed with the sporting-director model share one trait: they define an identity before buying players, rather than buying players and then searching for an identity. The clubs that fail tend to let the sporting director and the coach fight over decision rights, turning every transfer window into a tense negotiation rather than a process of construction. For FC Juárez, the question is harder because of timing. A new sporting director normally needs a full season to assess the squad, identify weaknesses and plan recruitment. Here, he would start mid-season, with a squad assembled under the previous regime and a coach he did not choose. That is an asymmetry of power and information, and it promises no small amount of tension. A sporting director, on taking a job, usually has only a very short window — call it the first hundred days — to prove his worth. In that window he must assess the current squad, identify positions to strengthen, build a relationship with the coaching staff, and, most importantly, convince the board that his vision is worth waiting for. If he fails at the last, everything else is meaningless. At a club sinking in crisis, those hundred days are even shorter, because the pressure of results allows no delay. This is the paradox of modern football: clubs hire a long-term strategist and then judge him by short-term standards. But the story is bigger still. FC Juárez turning to an executive with European experience is a statement of direction. It says the club believes in a model where long-term vision outweighs short-term reaction, where structure outweighs individuals, where strategy outweighs momentary inspiration. In a league famous for its dizzying coaching turnover, that is a notable choice — and a risky one. The risk is simple: the European model was born in a different ecosystem. There, clubs have large academy systems, transfer markets with clear rules, and boards that stay stable for years. Transplanted into a league like Liga MX — where short cycles, immediate pressure and boardroom volatility routinely break long-term plans — the model can be distorted or reduced to form. A sporting director without enough time or real authority is merely a man who signs papers, not one who builds. A good sporting director buys fit before he buys players. That is why, in Europe, top clubs spend months building a recruitment profile: they define the template for each position, based on the style they intend to pursue for years. When a player arrives, he is judged not only on skill but on how he fits the system. In Liga MX, the transfer market runs on a different logic. Clubs often depend on short-term deals, on foreign players brought in to solve immediate problems, and on trades between teams in the same league. Applying a long-term recruitment profile to such a market is not impossible, but it demands a level of patience and stability many clubs lack. If the board changes every season, the recruitment profile changes with it, and the sporting director becomes a man chasing momentary whims. This brings us back to the central question: is FC Juárez truly building a structure, or merely changing the face of an old one? The answer lies not in the name of the appointee, but in how much power and time he is given. I want to be blunt here, because honesty is what I promise myself every time I sit down to write. The information available on this story does not allow any tactical conclusion. We do not know FC Juárez's formation, their pressing height, their defensive organisation, or their expected goals against. The only data we have is the result: eight matches, zero points. And results, by themselves, describe output, not method. The heart of this story lies in structure, not in tactics. And in football, structure is the thing most often forgotten, because it has no image, no moment, no tears for cameras to capture. It lives backstage, in meetings nobody streams, in contracts nobody reads. Yet structure is precisely what decides whether those tears still have to fall. I think of the fans in Ciudad Juárez. They do not sit in the meeting room. They do not know who the sporting director is, who the president is, or which governance model is being applied. What they know is that every weekend they go to the stadium, they sing, and they hope. And when their team loses eight straight, they do not need an organisational chart to understand that something is wrong. Football is not read through the scoreline, but through the heartbeat of the people in the stands. The appointment of a sporting director may not change the result of the next match, but it can change how a club treats itself for the next ten years. That is why changes in the boardroom deserve serious attention, not just a subheading. I went through a controversy in the summer of 2026, when an article of mine about Vietnam's U23 team was criticised for lacking tactical analysis, and a veteran editor called me "a poet on the penalty spot". Instead of defending myself, I organised a three-hour online forum and invited both those who praised and those who criticised. What I learned that night was this: fans do not remember scorelines, but they remember moments. And one of the moments they remember most is the moment a team, or an individual, finds its own identity. The story at FC Juárez is, from one angle, also a story about finding an identity. A team that loses eight in a row does not merely lack points; it lacks a sense of itself. It does not know who it is on the pitch, and therefore does not know whom to buy, how to play, what to believe in. Appointing a sporting director, done properly, is an attempt to answer that question — not with a win, but with a vision. There is a story I keep telling. It is the night of the 2026 World Cup quarter-final, when Antoine Griezmann scored against Uruguay and Diego Godin sank to the ground, tears streaming. Griezmann did not celebrate, Godin wept — the match ended but the brotherhood did not. I tell it because it reminds me that football always has two faces: the face of the winner and the face of the loser. And sometimes the loser's face teaches us the most about human nature. Andrés Fassi, if he does leave, is no Godin. He will not weep on television, and no statue is likely to be built for him. But his story, and the story of those who sit in meeting rooms, is part of football too — the part the cameras usually miss. And if we only remember the goals, we miss half the story of the sport we love. And this is where I want to turn the question around, as I usually do with myself before concluding. Every headline asks: "Who will replace Andrés Fassi?" Attractive as it is, that question may be a trap. In football, the name in the chair is remembered, but the power that comes with the chair is what decides. A sporting director with full authority over transfers, over the academy, over coaching appointments, is an entirely different figure from one who only advises an ambitious but impatient president. If FC Juárez hands Ramón Planes — or anyone else — a chair with real power, that is a turning point. If it hands him a title to calm public opinion, that is a performance. And football history is full of such performances: sporting directors brought in as a communications fix, then pushed aside when results do not arrive as fast as expected. The blind spot lies here: we remember people, because people have faces and stories. But the problems of modern football are usually systemic, and systems have no face. When a team loses eight straight, collective memory looks to blame an individual — a coach, a president, a player who missed. But sometimes the real culprit is a structure that lets instability become the norm, lets patience become a luxury, and lets every season begin again from zero in strategic terms. Mexican football does not lack talent. What it may lack — and what clubs like FC Juárez are trying to recover — is a structure solid enough to keep that talent from being swept away by short-term storms. There is a distinction worth drawing clearly: reform versus decoration. Reform is when a club changes how it makes decisions, how it measures success, how it invests in people. Decoration is when it changes only faces while everything underneath stays the same. Many appointments in football, sadly, belong to the second kind. If FC Juárez is indeed pursuing an executive like Ramón Planes, the question worth asking is whether the club is truly ready to change. A structure can only work if it is given authority, protected from immediate interference, and judged by measures that match its vision. The gap between European and Latin American football, ultimately, does not stop at money or talent. It is also a gap in time. In Europe, a project can run three, four, five years, and a sporting director can outlast several coaching tenures. In Latin America, time contracts. A single season can decide the fate of an entire board, making every long-term plan fragile. Importing a model without importing time is a paradox. It is like planting an oak in a garden where the owner changes every season. The tree may take root, but to grow it needs an owner patient enough to believe it will one day cast shade. What Latin American football needs is not an importer but a translator: someone who understands both the language of European football and the pulse of a border city, where people still remember the days when violence emptied the stands. A good sporting director here would have to do two jobs at once: paint a long-term vision, and defend it against short-term storms he does not control. Without real power, he will be swept away with the first cycle of failure, and everything returns to zero. Every appointment carries a cycle of expectation. First hope — the newcomer is said to bring fresh air. Then scrutiny — early results shape how the public sees him. Then disappointment — if results do not come, trust collapses as fast as it was built. Finally, change — a new face appears, and the cycle begins again. The worrying part is this: each time the cycle closes, the club does not move closer to a sturdy structure. It just changes a name and leaves behind a heap of changes that never had time to take root. This is the loop many clubs in Latin America, and in Asia too, are stuck in. I write these lines from Hanoi, where Vietnamese football is wrestling with similar questions. How do you build a structure solid enough while the pressure for results demands instant outcomes? How do you give experts authority while fan trust depends on each match? Those questions do not belong to FC Juárez alone. They belong to any football culture trying to rise without losing its identity. Fans do not forget. This may be the thing boards most underestimate. They may not remember the signing date of a sporting director, but they remember how it felt when their team fell behind in the ninetieth minute. They remember the eyes of children in the stands, taken to the stadium for the first time, and they remember the sound of a whole stand singing in the final minutes of a match their team is about to lose. Those memories are what nourish a football culture. And they are what governance decisions must serve, however dry those decisions may be. So what would success look like here? It is not measured by a win next week. Success is when a club, looking back a year later, can point to a clearer identity, a squad better suited to that identity, and a decision-making process that all parties understand and respect. If that happens, Andrés Fassi's chair will no longer matter; what matters is the structure his successor leaves behind. When the stands fall silent, we finally hear football breathing. In Ciudad Juárez, that breath is echoing down empty corridors, where a sporting president may be leaving and a new executive may be arriving. Writing about football means sitting with people, listening to them tell the story of the match in which they were once themselves. In this story, those people include the players, the coaches, and the men and women in the meeting room, trying to find a way to love a club without losing themselves. Whoever takes the chair, the fans on the border will be in the stands this weekend. They will sing, and they will hope — because that is the only way they know to keep football in their city. And perhaps, after everything, that stubborn hope is the most solid foundation a club can have.