The Empty Chair in Ciudad Juárez: The Foundation-Builder Leaves Mid-Season

In Ciudad Juárez, a city on the Mexico–United States border, there is a stadium whose floodlights still glow across the fence every night. I have never set foot there. But in the notebook I have kept for nearly twenty years of this work, there are pages about border cities — places where football is not simply football, but a way for people to remind themselves that they belong somewhere, even if that somewhere can vanish at any moment. The day FC Juárez announced that Andrés Fassi was leaving his post as sporting president, I was sitting in a Manchester café, reading the item on my phone. A short statement. A few lines. Administrative language. Both parties reached a mutual agreement, in keeping with the future plans and interests of both sides. No successor named. No real explanation. And in my head a familiar image appeared: an empty chair. An empty chair still holds a person — we simply no longer hear their applause. A CITY THAT BELONGS TO NO ONE To understand why such a short news item deserves to be paused over, it must be placed where it belongs on the map. FC Juárez is not Real Madrid, nor América, nor Tigres. It is the team of Ciudad Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua, sitting right against El Paso, Texas, on the other side of the fence. Every day, tens of thousands of people cross the bridge between the two countries. Every day, there are people born on one side of the border, raised on the other, who spend a lifetime unsure of where they belong. Football in cities like this carries a different layer of meaning. The club is an anchor point. It is the only thing that stays still while everything around it shifts. When a club like FC Juárez plays in Mexico's top division — Liga MX — it is not just playing football. It is asserting the existence of a community before the rest of the country. Liga MX runs on its own rhythm. The league splits into two tournaments each year: Apertura and Clausura, each a short competition closing with a Liguilla for the top eight. This structure compresses time. A club does not have ten months to fix mistakes the way a Premier League side does. It has roughly seventeen matchdays to define itself. Miss one beat early and an entire season can drift away before anyone notices. And here is the crux: the announcement of Fassi's exit came in the middle of Apertura 2026. Not at season's end. Not during a transfer break. But in the middle of an ongoing tournament, when every decision — from scouting to contract renewals to relations with the coaching staff — needs someone accountable. A sporting president is not a head coach. That person does not stand on the touchline, does not adjust the formation, does not make the substitution on 70 minutes. Their role sits behind: shaping the recruitment philosophy, choosing and protecting the coach, building squad cycles, negotiating with agents, connecting the academy to the first team. It is work that is almost invisible in the stat sheets, yet it determines whether a club has an identity or is merely a collection of players. THREE YEARS AND INVISIBLE FOUNDATIONS Fassi sat in that chair for three years. This is the single most important detail in the whole story, and it is easily missed because it is written in neutral language. Three years in Mexican football is not a long stretch. It is just about the length of one project cycle: year one of construction, year two of evaluation, year three of either renewal or parting. Very few sporting presidents survive three years at a mid-tier club, where the pressure for results and limited resources always pull in two opposite directions. The fact that he stayed long enough for the club itself to describe him as having consolidated fundamental bases in sporting development says a great deal. The club uses an almost identical phrase twice. First: Fassi contributed his experience and vision to establish foundations within FC Juárez's sporting structure. Second, in the farewell thanks: he contributed his experience and vision to consolidate fundamental bases in the sporting development of our club. Read it carefully. They do not say he won trophies. They do not say he took the team to a semi-final. They say he built foundations. In the language of sporting governance, this is how you describe an institution-builder: someone who creates processes, sets up hierarchies, turns a loose department into a machine that can run even after its founder is gone. And that is the paradox. The better a foundation-builder does their job, the harder their departure is to measure in points. The players they brought in may shine for several more seasons. The coach they appointed may stay on the bench. The academy they reorganised may keep producing players. But the absence will only surface gradually, like a crack in a foundation wall, when the next transfer window arrives and no one has enough authority to make a decision. I have seen this kind of departure many times. In the documentary about empty stadiums I made, there was one character I never forgot. Paul, 58, a cleaner at Old Trafford, twenty years on the job. He told me that at night, when there is no match, he still hears the roar echoing back from the empty rows. No one is there. But the sound of twenty years does not switch itself off when people close the doors. A sporting president is the same. When they leave, most of their presence is not in the decisions they announced, but in the decisions never made — or held back. What does not happen is the hardest thing to see. And what does not happen is precisely the true reach of an administrator. THE GAP IN THE MIDDLE OF A SEASON What makes this item different from an ordinary personnel announcement is the timing. When a sporting director leaves at season's end, it is a decision with a rhythm. The club has time to find a replacement, arrange a handover, let the new person take full part in the transfer window. When they leave mid-season, the club falls into a gap that nothing fills. FC Juárez's statement names no successor. Nor does it say whether the sporting-president role will continue or be folded into another department. The club only says it must define the next steps to maintain its sporting project for the remainder of Apertura 2026. The phrase maintain its sporting project is worth pausing over. It indirectly admits the project could be disrupted. If everything were stable, no one would need to say maintain. They would simply do it. Having to publicly affirm that you will continue is a sign that internally you are aware of the risk of losing momentum. From my experience watching matches and the inner workings of many clubs, I find that a decision gap at sporting-director level usually does not show up immediately on the pitch. The team still takes the field. The coach still picks the eleven. But three things begin to slow down. First is scouting. A sporting president is the keeper of the long-term target list. When they leave, the list is still on the computer, but no one has enough authority to sign it off. Deals in mid-negotiation stall. Agents no longer know who to call. In football, a week of hesitation can be enough for a player to sign elsewhere. Second is the relationship with the coach. At many clubs, the sporting president is the one who shields the coach from pressure from the board and the fans. When that shield disappears, the coach stands alone. A poor run can quickly become a managerial crisis that someone should have absorbed the blow for. Third is the direction of the academy. Decisions about young players — who is promoted, who is loaned, who gets a professional contract — are usually made with a multi-year vision. Without someone to hold that vision, decisions tend to go short-term: keep the one who can play now over the one who can play in three years. None of this appears on the scoreboard. But it accumulates. That is why a mid-tier club losing its foundation-builder hurts more than a big club losing a director. Big clubs have layers of replacements, a bulky but sturdy machine. Small clubs depend on a few individuals carrying many things at once. Pull out one brick and the whole wall shakes. THERE IS ANOTHER REASON Most analysis of a departure like this will rush to the question: why? Poor results? A clash of views? Financial trouble? I do not think that is the right question. The statement says the two sides parted by mutual agreement, in keeping with the future plans and interests of both parties. This is the standard language of partings in Latin American football. It is designed to close the story, not open it. In this region's football culture, even partings genuinely tied to poor performance are usually presented in a courteous, mutually beneficial tone. Conversely, a truly amicable parting uses exactly the same language. The words themselves cannot distinguish the two cases. That means anyone who says for certain this was a disguised sacking, or for certain a routine end of mandate, is making things up. We do not know. And admitting we do not know is the starting point of any serious analysis. But there is one possibility that is mentioned less, and to me it is the most interesting: sometimes a clean parting is a sign of institutional maturity, not crisis. A club that has just escaped dependence on one individual will not cling to that person when he wants to go. They thank him, they wish him well, and they trust that the system will stand. If FC Juárez really did consolidate its foundations over three years, then Fassi's exit may be the first test: can the machine he left behind run on its own? At the other extreme, the warm tone and the absence of reasons can also be a sign of a tightly managed parting, where both sides want to protect each other's reputation. In that case, the silence says something happened that no one wants to talk about. Both readings are plausible. The difference will emerge over the next six months, when we see who is appointed, whether the recruitment philosophy changes, and whether the club holds its rhythm for the rest of Apertura. THE REVERSE ANGLE: THE ONE WHO LEAVES, THE CHAIR THAT STAYS In Vietnam there is a saying I have carried with me through my years working in England: people only remember the one who left when the empty chair starts to creak. When a figure leaves a position, their absence initially makes no sound. Everything seems to run. Only after a while does the chair begin to creak. In modern football, we are used to measuring greatness by tangible things: trophies, goals, transfer fees, expected-goals coefficients. But most of the work that truly matters in football happens where there are no cameras. The wage-budget meetings. The eleven p.m. calls with agents. The decision to keep a coach three more months despite poor results, simply because he needs time. Andrés Fassi, an Argentine, came to FC Juárez and stayed three years. He is a figure of influence at league level, having appeared in Primera División clubs' meetings, per photographs published by Mexican media. That means he was not merely an administrator of a small club. He belonged to the network of people operating Mexican football at its highest level. When a person like that leaves, the question is not who replaces him in that chair. The question is who takes his place in the meetings he used to attend. Power in football is not only written in the org chart. It lives in relationships. A phone call from Fassi could open a negotiation that an official statement cannot. When he goes, those lines do not vanish — they redirect. The question is where to. And this is what I believe is the core: in football, we often talk about figures as if they were fixed names. In reality, each of them is only a temporary role in a larger system. Fassi's three years in Ciudad Juárez will outlast his job title. It lives on in the players who were signed, the coaches who were trusted, the processes that were set up. And it will live on in the fracture his successor must mend, whether that person realises it or not. There is one detail I always notice in stories like this: the one leaving usually does not speak. In FC Juárez's statement, there is no quote from Fassi himself. The thanks come from the club, directed at him, but he says nothing. That silence may be courtesy. It may also be a man who already has somewhere else to go, and does not need to retell the old story. The empty chair says nothing at all. But the empty chair is not nothingness either. It is a reminder that someone has just left, and the next person will have to speak with their own voice. WHAT REMAINS AFTER THE WHISTLE In Moscow that night, I learned that the final whistle is only a rest. The match ends, but the story does not. It simply changes teller. FC Juárez's story is the same. A sporting president has left. A statement has been published. An empty chair sits in the meeting room. On the track, records are measured in hundredths of a second; out there, a life is measured in breaths. Football cannot measure the breath of a foundation-builder as he stands up and walks out the door. What I want to leave is not a prediction of where this club goes for the rest of Apertura 2026. That is something none of us, including those in the meeting room, can know for sure. What I want to leave is a question about how we look at invisible work. We devote thousands of articles to a player who scores on 90 minutes. We devote almost none to the person who arranged the dressing room, booked the flights, and kept an organisation from collapsing on itself for three years. When they leave, we write one line. When they stay, we write nothing. A good match is never fully told; it only waits for someone quiet enough to hear it. A good club is never fully told either, because most of its story does not happen on the pitch. It happens in rooms where the doors are closed, and in empty chairs we only notice are empty when it is too late. Perhaps FC Juárez will be fine. Perhaps the machine Andrés Fassi left behind will run on its own, and his exit will be remembered as a well-timed parting. Or perhaps the chair will start to creak within weeks. We do not know. But we should pay attention. Empty chairs are never merely places without a person. They are places where someone once sat, and places where all of us will have to sit down again to understand what changed when the meeting-room lights went out.