Full Match Highlights: Mexico 2–3 England | FIFA World Cup 2026 Round of 16
There are football stadiums, and then there is the Azteca. It is not just a stadium but a footballing mecca. It is where Mexico has played its best football in its history. The numbers alone tell you something is different here: 70 wins, 17 draws, two losses across 89 competitive internationals since the ground opened in 1966. In the World Cup specifically, Mexico have played ten matches at the Azteca across the 1970, 1986, and 2026 tournaments and remain unbeaten — eight wins, two draws — a record no other nation has matched at a single stadium. The only blemish in competitive play in recent memory came on a September night in 2013, when Honduras won there in a World Cup qualifier — and that result was shocking enough at the time to trigger the immediate sacking of the Mexican coach. Since then, nothing. Over a decade of invincibility on that hallowed pitch.
The stadium sits roughly 2,200 metres — 7,200 feet — above sea level, making it the highest-elevation stadium of any venue used at the 2026 World Cup. It is not only the altitude but the atmosphere: the air is as thick with pressure as it is low in oxygen. Eighty-seven thousand passionate souls crammed into the bowl, every one of them willing their team forward, willing the visiting legs to tire. The English squad, for all its talent, had not played there since 1986 — the year Maradona’s hand of God sent them crashing out in this very ground. The ghost of that afternoon has lingered for forty years. On paper, this was as formidable a task as the tournament could have served up.
Mexico came out and played this game exactly as they had played every other match in this tournament: on the front foot, aggressive, loud, taking the game directly to their opponents from the first whistle. It had been a formula of perfection. El Tri became just the fourth team in World Cup history to win their first four matches without conceding a single goal. They bested South Africa in the opener, dismantled South Korea (only allowing 2 shots on goal), and easily beat Czechia. In the knock-out phase, they suffocated Ecuador — all without conceding a goal. Just as its history had proved before this game, the Azteca had been impenetrable.
And then Jude Bellingham happened.
After an intense but mostly cagey opening half-hour, the game sparked into life in the 36th minute when England hit the hosts on the counter, Bukayo Saka looping a cross to the back post where Bellingham was on hand to power home a header. The first goal Mexico had conceded in five World Cup matches. The decibel level dropped for the first time all evening. Then, just 98 seconds later, Bellingham doubled England’s advantage. Two goals in a blink. The Azteca, briefly and improbably, fell quiet. Bellingham is the first player since Diego Maradona to score two goals in a World Cup game at the Azteca. The symmetry of that fact, given England’s history here, was not lost on anyone.
Mexico were not done in the first half, of course. They never are at home. In the 42nd minute, a free kick from the left flank saw a deflected ball fall to Julián Quiñones in the box, who had no problem drilling it past Pickford. At half-time it was 2-1, and the Azteca had rediscovered its voice.
The second half is where this game became something else entirely. In the 54th minute, England defender Jarell Quansah was given a straight red card after VAR reviewed a studs-up tackle that caught the leg of Jesús Gallardo. Ten men, in the Azteca, at altitude, against a rabid home team with something to prove. The script was writing itself. Mexico would surely find a way through now.
England had other ideas. Tuchel’s side dropped into a deep, resolute low block and simply refused to yield. Just six minutes after the red card, a penalty kick gave the ten men a chance to pad their lead, after Raúl Rangel fouled Anthony Gordon in the box. Another momentary loss in concentration had cost Mexico. Harry Kane converted it with ease, scoring his sixth goal of the tournament. Three-one. With ten men. At the Azteca.
What followed was a siege. Mexico poured forward in waves, the crowd urging them on, corner after corner, cross after cross. And this is where Jordan Pickford wrote his own chapter. Raúl Jiménez rose at the back post with a header destined for the net — and Pickford denied him again with world-class stops that will be replayed for years. (Pickford had denied Jiménez diving header early on in the game with a brilliant save where he steered the ball wide on a short-hop. Bellingham, playing marvelous defense, made a last-ditch intervention to deny César Montes in what would have been a certain equaliser. The entire English team threw their bodies on the line — Dan Burn, Djed Spence, John Stones — one block, one clearance, one intervention at a time.
The game did take another huge momentum swing when Kane was penalised for a foul inside his own box, and Jiménez slotted home the resulting penalty to set up a frantic final twenty minutes. At 3-2, with a man down, the Azteca was shaking. With one of the final throws of the Mexican dice, another cross ricocheted in the box, but Stones made a well-timed sliding intervention, clearing the ball just the wrong side of the post. After eleven minutes of added time, the breakthrough Mexico needed never came.
The final whistle was met with tears streaming down Mexican faces. England buried the ghost and banished the demons of their last visit to this stadium in 1986, when that Maradona handball controversially sent them crashing out. England ended the game with an xG of just 1.55 compared to Mexico’s 1.94 across 20 shots. The data, as it so often does in this tournament, tells a story the scoreline doesn’t fully capture. Mexico were the better team for large stretches.
But football is not played in spreadsheets. It is played in two-minute hurricanes where Jude Bellingham scores twice before the opposition can catch its breath, and in desperate last-ditch blocks in added time at altitude with ten men. England survived, again, on character and individual brilliance. Pickford, Bellingham, Kane — three names that kept England alive when the odds and the atmosphere conspired against them.
England now go to Miami on Saturday for a quarter-final clash with Erling Haaland’s Norway, who stunned five-time champions Brazil earlier in the day. For Mexico, the wait to reach a first World Cup quarter-final since 1986 goes on. El quinto partido was achieved, but now the sexto remains to be added to Mexico’s World Cup history.
As for the Azteca — it remains unbeaten, technically. But England just walked out of it with three goals and a place in the last eight. Sometimes the fortress falls without the record changing.
PKs:
The irony of Pickford’s two saves were not lost on those that followed Jimenez’s career. The fact that he almost died from a head injury on a pitch in England and yet he is still quite adept at scoring with his head is extraordinary.
Gerardo Mora has played as well as any 17 year old can play at this level. His turnover that led to England’s second goal was as costly as it was naive. Thinking he could turn against two England’s defenders, he lost the ball which initiated the break that led to Bellingham’s second goal. He will learn from this mistake and all Mexican fans hope will become one of the country’s most storied players.
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