When Mexico takes to the pitch in June’s football World Cup opening game, the nation will be glued to the television cheering on their team. Residents living near the iconic Azteca stadium, however, will be counting the cost to their dwindling water supplies.
The 2026 men’s tournament will be the first to be co-hosted by three nations: games are taking place in 16 host cities across Mexico, the United States and Canada. Mexico will host 13 of the 104 matches – with five in the capital – and is anticipating more than 5.5 million additional visitors in June.
The event is expected to generate USD 620 million in ticket sales, accommodation bookings and other consumer spending in Mexico City. As well as an MXN 2 billion (USD 110 million) renovation of the Azteca, authorities have announced a series of ambitious public works projects for the area. These include a 34 km bike lane extending from the centre of the city, the repaving of roads around the stadium and the construction of a 1.5 km elevated pedestrian walkway on Tlalpan Avenue.
Félix Aguirre, director of the Azteca – now officially known as the Banorte stadium – says its renovation will secure the venue’s future for up to five decades.
But for those living in its shadow, this flurry of public investment has done little to assuage concerns about their already-waning water supplies.
There are three wells in the immediate area of the Azteca but for the past 12 years, Norma Piñón explains, the taps in the family home have only received water two or three times a week. She lives near the stadium, in Santa Úrsula Coapa.
When water is available, the family fills up the tanks that line their patio and rooftop. Piñón reuses laundry water to mop, and water her plants: “We have to know how to recycle it.”
The neighbourhood is mostly home to self-built family houses, like the Piñóns’. A real-estate company recently acquired a property behind their home, however, and started building a modern, 19-unit apartment complex. The eight-storey construction on Popocatepetl Street will tower over the buildings around it.
According to the neighbours, an advertisement marketed the apartments’ strategic location for the upcoming World Cup. Piñón is concerned this development will be more than the local water supply can handle: “I don’t know where they’re going to get the water.”
Within the ambitious World Cup infrastructure plans, Mexico City’s head of government announced urban regeneration works for three areas: Santa Úrsula, Pueblo de Santa Úrsula and San Lorenzo Huipulco. These were to include upgrades to potable water supplies and the construction of stormwater collectors. But for residents who have spent years without reliable water access, and who accuse government officials and private developers of a lack of transparency, there is reason to be dubious.
Water inequality
Before colonisation, the inhabitants of Anahuac Valley – as the present-day Mexico City metropolitan area was known – had a harmonious relationship with water. That is according to Gonzalo Hatch Kuri, a geography professor at the National School of Earth Sciences at Mexico’s National Autonomous University. Today, amidst rapid urban development, inhabitants of the city face frequent water cutoffs. “The problem isn’t scarcity,” says Hatch Kuri. “The problem is the unequal distribution of water.”
Mexico City draws its public water supply from three main sources: a network of wells in the city and metropolitan area; a chain of reservoirs known as the Lerma-Cutzamala system; and a series of dams that start in the western state of Michoacán. All those systems feed into the network that provides homes with potable water.
Real-estate companies are among the city’s industries that consume the most water, according to data from Mexico City’s water authorities. When it comes to new developments, such companies are required to present public water studies that demonstrate sufficient water supplies.
Neighbours claim the new apartments behind Piñón’s home lack these necessary permits and studies. In early December, city authorities shut down the construction site, but videos recorded by locals appeared to show work continuing.
Also controversial was the decision to award a permit to Televisa, the media corporation that owns the Azteca via a subsidiary. The company had applied for a permit to support an application for the Estadio Azteca complex, which included shopping malls, hotels and offices next to the stadium. The project was suspended following local opposition but the permit was still granted. This is fuelling fears that large-scale development could still happen in the future.
Santa Úrsula Coapa is legally recognised as one of Mexico City’s founding neighbourhoods. This designation grants the community self-governance rights and planning powers. However, according to the head of the town’s communal-governance structure, Ruben Ramírez, the legally required consultation for the regeneration works here was not carried out before the permit was granted.
According to a map provided by residents of Santa Úrsula Coapa, Conagua has designated the neighbourhood a high-risk zone for water stress due to heavy exploitation of water. “This implies a total risk for all the community around the stadium because the aquifer is at very low levels,” Ramírez tells Dialogue Earth. “We are totally within our rights to demand that this concession be revoked. It does not fulfil any of the parameters established in [government] norms, and violates the rights of the Indigenous town of Santa Úrsula.”
Official information about water extraction in Mexico City is scarce. There is no public registry of concessions granted to private companies.
The city’s water authority, Segiagua, did not respond to a request for comment. Representatives from Televisa could not be reached for comment.
The water defenders
In July, hundreds of people took to the streets of southern Mexico City in an anti-gentrification march. It was the second in a series of recent mobilisations to denounce real-estate speculation linked to the World Cup. Luis Alberto Salinas Arreortua, a geographer at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, has warned of the risks of gentrification, including the eventual displacement of local people.
Among protestors were members of the Front for the Defence of the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples and Neighbourhoods of the Anáhuac Basin (FDDPBOCA). The organisation, which defends the rights of the city’s founding and Indigenous neighbourhoods, is opposing 50 real-estate mega-developments across Mexico City.
A common factor in these disputes is the overexploitation of water: real-estate developments that place yet more demands on the city’s water system. It is a key threat to longtime residents (some of whom trace their routes back to pre-Hispanic settlements in the valley). The evidence is in the neighbours’ taps: residents in the south of the city say they have watched their water supplies dwindle when shopping malls and apartment complexes are established nearby.
“Real-estate capital dreams of coming to the south of the city to get the people’s water,” claims Alejandro Ortiz, a member of the FDDPBOCA.
The group released a report in January 2025 detailing the estimated water demands of a series of ongoing projects, including several in the vicinity of the Azteca. They include the expansion of the Gran Sur shopping mall, with a demand of 109,650 litres of water per day; the three 30-storey apartment towers known as Mantik Luis Cabrera require 408,280 litres across 586 apartments.
In 2017, research conducted by the University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom, explored human-rights abuses connected to “mega-events” like the World Cup. It found that there is a “routinization of harm to local populations”.
Fifa, the tournament organiser, did not respond to a request for comment. Previous World Cups have taken place amid controversies over harms linked to them, including mass displacement of favela residents before the 2014 Brazil tournament and alleged migrant worker abuses in the run-up to the 2022 tournament in Qatar.
With five World Cup matches scheduled at the Azteca, activists say the mega-event is not just a sporting milestone. It could also mark an inflection point for who has the right to running water.
Article thumbnail: Mauricio Salas / Alamy
