Borja's Bicycle Kick at the Azteca and the Silenced Voice of Hugo Sánchez

In the 72nd minute at Estadio Azteca, Miguel Borja received the ball from a scrambled rebound inside the penalty area. The ball hung in the air long enough for an ordinary striker to choose the safe option - a side-foot finish, a header, or simply waiting for it to drop onto the grass before taking a touch. Borja chose otherwise. He rotated his body in mid-air, his left leg swinging on a trajectory that fitness coaches usually advise against trying at 31. The ball ended up in Chivas' net in the Clásico Nacional, the biggest match in Mexican football. I replayed that moment seven times. Not to admire how beautiful the strike was, but to understand what happened afterward. When a player scores a goal like that, the reactions of the media and the people involved often reveal more than the match itself. The following day, on ESPN's Futbol Picante, Hugo Sánchez said something I had to read three times. He said that since Borja scored that goal, not a single journalist, commentator or analyst - not one - had said it reminded them of Hugo Sánchez. And he added a line that Mexican media would quote repeatedly: that no one mentioning him made him feel as though foam or blood was pouring from their mouths. That is a sentence designed to shock. But behind it lies a bigger problem than a legend's wounded pride. Hugo Sánchez is not an ordinary former player in Mexico. He is the icon of an era - a man who scored 234 goals for Real Madrid between 2026 and 2026, winning the Pichichi, La Liga's top scorer award, five times in six seasons. But what makes him a distinctive figure in Mexican football memory is not just the goals. It is how he scored them. The bicycle kick - in Spanish called chilena or bicicleta - is tied to Hugo Sánchez's name to a degree few players ever achieve. He performed it so often that it became a technical signature, a fingerprint. In Mexico, when you talk about a beautiful bicycle kick, you mention Hugo Sánchez before anyone else. That is a historical fact, not an opinion. And that is why his reaction that night is worth analyzing. According to him, when Borja scored against Chivas, journalists compared it to Cristiano Ronaldo. To Raúl Jiménez. To other names. But no one mentioned Hugo Sánchez. The man whose name is tied to that move in Mexico. In a Clásico Nacional. At the Azteca. Where he once played for both Pumas and América. The paradox sits here: Hugo Sánchez is not wrong historically. Borja performed the very move Hugo Sánchez made famous in Mexico. But the media's reaction was not wrong in context either. They were simply responding to a different instinct - one that perhaps Hugo Sánchez himself once triggered when he was a player. I need to be clear about one thing before going deeper: Borja's bicycle kick, however beautiful, is not a tactical signal. It is an individual technical moment. It tells us nothing about whether América press high or low, nothing about their shape, nothing about how they build out from the back. Anyone trying to turn this goal into a tactical doctrine is selling readers a product that does not exist. What it does tell us is something more relevant to contemporary Mexican football: a story about the culture of memory. To execute a bicycle kick correctly, a player must solve a three-dimensional problem in roughly 0.8 to 1.2 seconds. Read the trajectory of the ball before it enters the contact zone. Rotate the pelvis along the vertical axis while keeping the head and torso stable enough that the eyes do not lose the ball. Choose the moment to swing the leg when the ball sits at an optimal distance between hip and shoulder, usually around a 45-degree angle to the ground. And finally, maintain balance on landing so that you do not fall over and lose your tactical position. Borja did all of that. But what caught my attention was the moment before - the rebound after a scramble in the box. This was not a designed phase. This was a live phase, where everything is random. And in those phases, only a tiny number of strikers react by choosing the hardest action rather than the safest one. Most forwards in Liga MX would side-foot it. They would score, or not, and the match would continue. Borja chose the thing people would remember. That is a psychological quality, not a purely technical one. And it is what makes his story, and Hugo Sánchez's reaction to it, complicated. When Hugo Sánchez said no one mentioned him, he was complaining about a fact. But the bigger question is: why? Why, when a Mexican journalist witnesses a bicycle kick in a Clásico Nacional, do they think of Cristiano Ronaldo before thinking of Hugo Sánchez? The answer lies not in disrespect. It lies in the reference points of each generation. For journalists and commentators under 35 in Mexico, their football memory is shaped by four things: Pep Guardiola's Barcelona, Cristiano Ronaldo's Real Madrid, Champions League finals, and social media. In that world, Cristiano Ronaldo's bicycle kick against Juventus in Turin in 2026 occupies an iconic spot. It is the bicycle kick millions watched on YouTube, shared, and remembered as the definition of the move. Hugo Sánchez, by contrast, has bicycle kicks that Mexicans under 35 - aside from former players and long-serving journalists - may never have fully watched. They know his name. They know he is a legend. But they have never sat in front of a TV watching him execute the move in real time. This is a memory gap - a gap that I believe Hugo Sánchez is reacting to, even if he may not be conscious of it. And in some ways, that is something every legend faces as the next generation of the sport grows up. Pele. Diego Maradona. Johan Cruyff. Franz Beckenbauer. All of them must accept that one day, when a young player performs a move they made famous, people will compare it to a name closer to the modern audience. Academy archaeology is what I call my work. And in this case, I am excavating a specific stratum: the stratum Hugo Sánchez represents, and the stratum Borja just touched. I was born in England and live in Vietnam. That means I have no direct memory of Hugo Sánchez as a player. I know him through clips, books, and historical articles. That is a form of indirect memory - one that I think can help me view this event from a useful distance. Based on my experience watching matches, I have repeatedly seen this phenomenon: legends of one generation, when they transition into commentary or media roles, often get stuck between two worlds. They want to be remembered as people who shaped the sport. But the new audience lacks the context to understand what they did. In Vietnam, I have seen the same thing with former Vietnamese stars - men who played in the SEA Games or AFF Cup in the 1990s and 2000s - when they complain that current young players are not being credited for what they did. And the interesting thing is those former stars are usually right historically, but they are speaking to an audience whose memory begins at an entirely different point. That is the nature of collective memory. It is not archived fairly. It is archived according to what gets passed on. If we stop at Hugo Sánchez's reaction, this story is tabloid material. But there is a deeper layer to excavate, and this is why I am writing this piece. For over a decade, European football has become the center of global football memory. What happens in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga is recorded, broadcast, archived, and distributed at a quality superior to anywhere else. Smaller leagues like Liga MX, MLS, or the V-League have less archival material, fewer distribution channels, and therefore less influence in shaping the memory of later generations. That means that about thirty years ago, a Mexican player like Hugo Sánchez could become a global icon because he played for Real Madrid and appeared in footage broadcast worldwide. But a Mexican player in Liga MX, however talented, would struggle for a similar chance to become global memory. The concentration of sports media has created an unfair memory regime. In that regime, the memory of Hugo Sánchez persists - but within a narrower space: the space of former players, of long-serving journalists, of those who lived through the 1980s. And when Borja scored at the Azteca, the young journalists do not live in that space. They live in the space of Cristiano Ronaldo, of YouTube, of Twitter, of goals reshared millions of times. This is what I want to call the memory stratigraphy of football. Every generation has its own sedimentary layer, and those layers do not naturally communicate. They only communicate when someone digs them up - usually an angry legend, or a curious journalist, or an outsider like me. The popular reaction on social media after the story spread was to mock Hugo Sánchez. He was called arrogant, jealous of the younger generation, an old man refusing to accept that his era had passed. Part of that mockery is fair - his delivery was theatrical. But if we set emotions aside, there is something he is implicitly pointing to that professional football analysis should take seriously: the poverty of comparative language in football media. Think about it. When Borja scored the bicycle kick, journalists needed a benchmark. They reached for what was easiest to access. Cristiano Ronaldo, because he is globally famous. Raúl Jiménez, because he is a Mexican playing in the Premier League. But they did not reach for Hugo Sánchez. Why? Not because Hugo Sánchez is technically irrelevant - but because reaching for Hugo Sánchez requires a kind of historical knowledge that modern journalists are rarely trained in. And here is the counterintuitive point: the problem is not that Hugo Sánchez was forgotten. The problem is that modern football media has lost the ability to place present moments within a long historical current. Everything is compared to what is hot, not to what once mattered. I have seen this when writing about young players in Vietnam. When a young player scores a beautiful goal, the reaction is usually to compare him to Nguyễn Quang Hải or Nguyễn Công Phượng - players still active, players with highlights online. Rarely does anyone compare him to Lê Huỳnh Đức or Lê Công Vinh, legends who have retired. That does not mean Vietnamese journalists disrespect the previous generation. It means they are reacting on the instinct of the media age. But that instinct, left unchecked, produces a memory stream that is ever shorter and ever poorer. And in that stream, legends like Hugo Sánchez will gradually disappear, not because they do not deserve to remain, but because no one has the patience to dig them up. Every transfer deal is a stratum. The hasty count the money; the archaeologist reads the era. In this case, I am reading the era through a three-second play. There is one thing I am sure of: Borja's goal will be remembered. Not because it is the greatest in Clásico history - that is a claim no one can prove - but because it is a rare individual technical moment, one people will replay many times. As for Borja, I think he will face a new kind of pressure. Not the pressure to score, since he is used to that at 31. But the pressure to keep producing special moments. That is the trap every player who scores an iconic goal must face. The next match after such a goal is always the hardest, because attention converges on it. As for Hugo Sánchez, I think this story will fade within weeks. It is not a scandal, not a transfer, not an injury. It is a cultural echo. But it leaves a question I think will keep returning over the coming years: how do we treat legends when their generation is no longer the primary reference point? There is a detail I want to stress, because I think it is often overlooked in debates about Hugo Sánchez and Borja. Borja's bicycle kick came after a scramble, not from a designed phase. In English, it is called a scrambled situation. It is the kind of scenario where players must rely entirely on instinct. And the moment a player chooses the hardest action rather than the safest one is the moment a player defines himself. Hugo Sánchez, throughout his career, was famous for repeatedly choosing the hardest action in similar situations. That is why his name is tied to the move. Not only because he executed it beautifully, but because he had the nerve to attempt it where others would take the safe route. And this is what I think Hugo Sánchez is really complaining about, even if he may not say it: Borja did what he himself once did. And when Borja did it, no one mentioned his name. Not because journalists do not know Hugo Sánchez, but because modern football memory does not archive the connections between generations. I call it the stratigraphic gap - a gap between two memory layers with no bridge. And every time a young player does something a legend once did, the gap reappears. It does not get filled. It is merely mentioned in an ESPN interview, then covered over by a new story. There is another question I think is worth asking: do Mexican journalists really not know about Hugo Sánchez, or do they know but choose not to mention him out of fear of creating a comparison unfavorable to Borja? In sports media, there is an unwritten rule I have observed over many years: comparing a contemporary player to an old legend always carries risk. If the contemporary player falls short, the writer is accused of hype. If the contemporary player outshines the legend, the writer is accused of disrespect. So the safest option is to compare to active players, because those comparisons stir less controversy. It is a form of self-censorship. And it, along with the poverty of historical knowledge, has produced an environment where legends like Hugo Sánchez are only mentioned when they speak up themselves. If there is one thing I want readers to take from this piece, it is that how we remember sporting moments is not merely a matter of individual memory. It is a systemic matter. What gets broadcast, what gets archived, what gets carried through social media - all of that shapes the stratum that later generations will excavate. Hugo Sánchez is right that he deserves to be mentioned in a moment like Borja's bicycle kick. But he is not the only one. Hundreds of players from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Vietnam have done similar things and been forgotten by this unfair memory system. The only way to fight that is to actively dig. Not by generating emotional debates on television. But by writing, recording, and transmitting what happened in a way later generations can access. That is why I do this work. I do not hunt stars. I hunt the moment they were forgotten. Excavated from the sedimentary layer, where names have yet to be carved into legend. Borja's goal will live in YouTube highlight reels for years. Hugo Sánchez will keep appearing on ESPN. Cristiano Ronaldo will remain the reference point for bicycle kicks. And young journalists in Mexico will keep comparing new moments to the stars they grew up with. That will not change. But one thing can: how we remember. If, every time a player does something special, we reach not only for what is accessible but also for what made history, that stratum will grow thicker. And when later generations dig, they will find more of what we left behind. Borja's bicycle kick is not the goal of the century. It is a beautiful technical moment in a Clásico. But it woke a debate about memory, and that, to me, is its greatest value. I will return to this story when we know whether Borja keeps producing such moments. And I will return to Hugo Sánchez when someone else in Mexican media actively digs up the strata he left behind. There are players unknown to the media world but not unknown to history. Borja, as of today, is no longer one of them. Hugo Sánchez, as of today, is reminding himself not to be forgotten. And both, in one night at the Azteca and one night on television, accidentally opened a window into how football preserves its own memory. Empty stands, but history is still recording every ball. And at the Azteca that night, history added another line, though no one is yet sure who will read it.