Today, Real Madrid will face Mexican club Pachuca in the final of the inaugural FIFA Intercontinental Cup from Doha, Qatar.
For Real Madrid, this is just another newly-minted tournament they have to navigate amongst a crowded fixture list that includes La Liga, Champions League, and other competitions across an injury-stricken season.
To their opponents, however, this is one of the biggest matches in their long and storied history as one of Mexico’s oldest and most notable football organizations.
The Sporting News brings you an overview of CF Pachuca, the team hoping to spring an upset on the global stage with 90 minutes to shock the world.
MORE: How the 2024 FIFA Intercontinental Cup Works Reformatted
Mexican club CF Pachuca was founded in 1892, making the club 132 years old as of their match against Real Madrid in the 2024 Intercontinental Cup.
CF Pachuca is the oldest football club in Mexico. It was founded through miners operating in the Pachuca area, who were mostly British immigrants, the first to introduce soccer to Mexico. In 1902, CF Pachuca was one of the five founding members of Mexico’s first football club. league.
The club was dissolved in 1922 due to financial ramifications of the Mexican revolution, but was re-founded in 1960 and has remained in effect since.
CF Pachuca are known as the “Tuzos” which translates in English to “gophers.”
The call is a tribute to the club’s mining origins, since miners are called “gophers” due to their underground nature.
The Mexican state of Hidalgo, where Pachuca is located, has a deep mining heritage and a region in minerals such as gold, silver, lead, zinc and copper. Mexico as a whole has a very long history as a silver mining country, at least as it should be noted that Mexican silver flooded the global market in the eighteenth century and made the Spanish colonists incredibly wealthy.
CF Pachuca have won seven top-flight league titles in club history. That comes with a bit of an asterisk, however, as the Mexican league has split its season into halves, with both the Apertura and Clausura handing out trophies for the winner.
Their most recent title came in 2022 when they won the Apertura, or first-half of the league season. They finished fourth in the league table, but progressed through the playoff, beating top seed Club America in the semifinals before topping Toluca in the final.
But he lost the overall title, as Champion of Champions, to Tigres UNAL. To date, Pachuca has never won a Champion of Champions.
Pachuca has had much better luck at the continental level than at the domestic level, winning the CONCACAF Champions Cup six times in the club’s history. Their first edition took place in 2002 and they won the last edition in 2024 to reach the newly reformatted Intercontinental Cup.
As the 2024 Intercontinental Cup final approaches, CF Pachuca has many foreign stars in its squad.
Their standout player is striker Salomon Rondon, who played 115 games abroad for Venezuela and played time in England for West Brom and Newcastle. He has also played for La Liga teams Malaga and Las Palmas, and recently for a maximum of a year with Argentine giants River Plate.
The club’s most notable Mexican foreigner is Arturo González, a 30-year-old winger with five international caps in his career. Lately he is in Pachuca on loan from the Mexican club CF Monterrey.
According to Transfermarkt, the club’s most valuable player is 28-year-old Oussama Idrissi, a Dutch-born winger with nine caps for Morocco and valued at around €7 million. He is only Nelson Deossa, 24 years old, a midfielder with young foreigners who enjoy Colombia. Left back Bryan González, 21, a young product of Pachuca, debuted with the Mexico national team at the end of 2023.
The club captain is Argentine defender Gustavo Cabral, a former River Plate youth player who has been at Pachuca for five years and joined in 2019 from La Liga Celta de Vigo.
Kyle Bonn graduated in television journalism from Syracuse University and has been covering soccer on a global scale for more than a decade. Kyle specializes in football tactics and betting and has a bachelor’s degree in knowledge analysis. Kyle also produces television broadcasts for Wake Forest football and previously appeared on NBC Soccer and IMG College. When he’s not covering the game, he’s long been unwavering with the New York Giants, Yankees and Fulham. Kyle enjoys racquetball games and video games when he’s not watching or covering sports.