Fire Beyond the Controlled Zone: A Fireworks Blast in Mexico and What Football Must Confront

On the afternoon of Thursday, 24 September, in the San Francisco Tepojaco district of Cuautitlán Izcalli, State of Mexico, a religious procession was moving along Aldama Street when a private vehicle loaded with firecrackers caught fire. Witnesses described how the flames spread quickly, sending glass and metal fragments into the crowds lining the road. A fifteen-year-old boy died. Eleven people were taken for treatment: seven minors and four adults. A forty-one-year-old man was later discharged. Civil Protection, Firefighters, municipal police, the State of Mexico Security Secretariat and the National Guard all attended the scene. The injured were taken to hospitals within the IMSS network in Lomas Verdes.

The most striking element of this story, and the only one carrying genuine analytical weight, sits in a short statement from the Cuautitlán Izcalli city authorities: that procession was not part of the authorised festivities programme. In other words, an event involving pyrotechnics, a crowd and children took place outside any controlled framework, just days before the official festivities were due to begin on 2 October.

I am telling this story not because it belongs to football. It does not belong to football. But I have spent years standing on terraces, in stadium corridors, and in the zones people call "restricted", and I have recognised a common language between the procession at Cuautitlán Izcalli and football terraces around the world. Fire. And the way human beings organise that fire — or allow it to organise itself.

Football and Fire: An Unresolved Relationship

Every weekend, in Serie A, in the Süper Lig, in the Greek Super League, across South American and Southeast Asian competitions, thousands of flares are lit on the terraces. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is part of terrace culture, passed from one generation to the next, with its own language, its own rituals, its own timetable. People light flares in the fifteenth minute to honour a legend, in the eightieth to protest against the board, in the ninetieth to send a manager on his way. No data table captures that, and no betting model prices it.

But the death of a fifteen-year-old boy in Mexico poses a question football has dodged for decades: when the fire is outside the controlled zone, who is responsible?

What most competitions have done so far is answer that question with punishment. UEFA has disciplinary rules on flares, fireworks and incendiary devices inside stadiums. Depending on severity, sanctions may range from fines to partial stand closures, full stand closures, or matches played at neutral venues. National federations carry similar provisions. In Vietnam, V.League organisers also have strict rules on incendiary objects inside stadiums.

But if punishment worked, there would not have been thousands of flares lit every weekend for the past twenty years.

The Overlooked Point: A Controlled Zone Is Not a Prohibited Zone

Based on my experience covering matches, including matches with flares, I have come to recognise something few in the industry say outright: the problem is not the fire. The problem is that a large crowd, in a closed or semi-closed space, has nobody taking responsibility for the controlled zone.

At a religious procession, the controlled zone usually sits in the hands of a community organising group with no training in explosive materials. At a football match, the controlled zone sits in the hands of stadium organisers and security staff trained to prevent, but not to manage. Between those two poles lies an enormous gap I call the grey zone.

The grey zone is where anything can happen and nobody can control it. In Mexico, the grey zone was a private vehicle carrying firecrackers moving within an unlicensed procession. In a stadium, the grey zone is the corridor area between the outer perimeter and the stand, where a supporter can carry a flare inside a jacket pocket.

Under current rules in many European federations, bringing flares into a stadium is illegal. But enforcement depends on a very small detail: how many security staff are at the gate, and whether they have time to search every pocket. For a match with fifty thousand people, searching every individual is mathematically impossible. That is why flares still get in.

Terrace Ritual: Why It Cannot Be Banned by Decree

I have spent years observing terrace ritual. In Italy, when an ultras group lights flares, they follow a pre-written script: the group leader signals, others light in unison, the chanting rises together with the smoke. In Turkey, flares tend to be lit at derbies, and are treated as a way of asserting the group's existence. In South American competitions, people use smoke bombs and explosive firecrackers, devices far more powerful than ordinary flares.

In Vietnam, I have witnessed stands at V.League matches lit up by flares, and I understand that for supporters this is not merely vandalism. It is a ritual. Anyone who bans ritual by administrative decree without replacing it with another ritual will fail. The history of European football makes this very clear.

Take Italy. For decades, Serie A tried to erase flares with fines and stand closures. The result was that ultras groups shifted to lighting flares at harder-to-detect moments, using smaller devices, and producing increasingly complex displays. Fines rose, and so did the behaviour. In a sense, the fine became the price of the ritual, and supporter groups were willing to pay it.

By contrast, in some Nordic countries, instead of banning, authorities experimented with a managed "pyro zone": a specific area of the stand, with safety distances, medical staff on standby, and rules on which types of flare may be used. This model is not perfect, but it shifts the issue from confrontation to management. More importantly, it acknowledges that ritual cannot be entirely erased.

Multi-Season Verification: The Safety Promises

I have a habit of returning to verify promises. After every flare incident that causes injury, club boards issue statements about increased security. After every fireworks blast at a community event, authorities issue statements about tightening permits. Those statements sound very firm. But when I return two seasons later, I usually find things much the same.

In Cuautitlán Izcalli, city authorities stated that the procession was not part of the authorised programme. That is a typical defensive communications move: an institution defining in advance what it did not authorise, before investigation results are published. I have seen this move many times in football, whenever an incident occurs and the parties involved begin to apportion responsibility.

What is notable is that the main festivities in Cuautitlán Izcalli were due to begin on 2 October, only days after the incident. This is precisely the point where I want to pause longest, because it contains a direct lesson for football: a major event had been planned in advance, with a permitting machinery already running, and yet a smaller event outside that framework still took place and produced a fatal outcome. The permitting machinery existed, but enforcement capacity did not keep pace.

In football, we see the same thing at every level. Federations have rules. Clubs have security staff. But between rule and enforcement lies a gap filled by habit. When habit permits something, the rule becomes a formality.

The Grey Zone and the Trap of Silence

In my profession, silence is a frightening thing. When an incident occurs and no source steps forward to confirm, the numbers turn ambiguous. In the Cuautitlán Izcalli story, eleven of fourteen information points carry no clear source. The figure "eleven injured" appears in the headline, but the body text says seven minors and four adults were treated, which also adds to eleven. Whether the deceased fifteen-year-old falls inside or outside that eleven, the text does not say. Whether the discharged forty-one-year-old is among them is also unclear.

I raise this detail to show one thing: even casualty figures, which sound most objective, can turn ambiguous when sourcing is weak. Football is the same. Every transfer window, we read hundreds of figures about transfer fees, wages and contract lengths. Many of those figures have no clear source, yet they are repeated until they become "fact". I have spent three weeks verifying a single source, and sometimes the result of that verification was: unverifiable.

The silence of sources is not a sign of hidden truth. Sometimes it is only a sign of opacity. And in both cases, the reader is placed in a position of having to believe something without grounds.

The Anonymous People Who Hold the Structure

One of the things I learned after years of reporting is this: the most important figures usually do not appear on television. In the Cuautitlán Izcalli incident, four response agencies were named, but not a single individual. No mayor, no police chief, no Civil Protection director, no procession organiser. The chain of responsibility is entirely sealed in anonymity.

In football, I have had a similar experience. I once spent months interviewing kit staff, physiotherapists and training-ground managers. They are the people who hold a team's real structure, yet none of them appears on the evening news. When a club enters crisis, people tend to look for causes in the manager or the star player. But sometimes the cause lies in a dressing room lacking someone responsible for the smallest details.

Back in March 2026, at the Camp des Loges training ground, I spent six consecutive months following PSG. I noted meticulously that Neymar always spent fifteen minutes before training dribbling through six cones in an unchanging order, quite different from Unai Emery's session plan. I once watched him repeat that drill one hundred and twenty-seven times in a month. When I asked, he simply smiled and said "habit". That habit let me read his psychological state through the speed of his execution.

What I learned from that experience was not a secret about Neymar. What I learned was this: small, repeated rituals hold more information than any data table. And in the Mexico story, that small ritual was carrying firecrackers in a private vehicle, following a habit repeated many times before without consequence. Until this time.

The Counterintuitive Angle: Banning Fireworks Saves Nobody

There is a conclusion most people want to hear after incidents like this: ban it completely. Ban flares in stadiums. Ban fireworks in processions. Ban everything. It sounds decisive, sounds strong, and is entirely useless if nothing replaces it.

I want to say this plainly: banning fireworks saves nobody, if people still have a reason to light them. Because the nature of a ban is that it acts only on behaviour, not on motive. The motive for lighting flares in football is ritual, identity, belonging. The motive for lighting fireworks in a procession is faith, tradition, community memory. No ban erases those things.

So what actually saves people? A controlled zone. Not a prohibited zone, but a controlled zone. The difference between the two is enormous. A prohibited zone says: you may not do this. A controlled zone says: if you do this, it must happen here, this way, with these people responsible. A prohibited zone pushes behaviour into darkness. A controlled zone brings behaviour into light.

In Cuautitlán Izcalli, the procession sat outside the authorised programme. That is precisely what a prohibited zone produces: behaviour pushed outside the framework, and therefore controlled by nobody. If that procession had been inside the programme, there might have been Civil Protection staff accompanying it, there might have been rules on transporting fireworks, there might have been a safety distance from the crowd. Nobody can guarantee that would have prevented the death, but at least someone would have been responsible.

In football, the same thing is happening. Competitions ban flares, and flares still enter stadiums. But competitions do not build controlled zones. They do not tell supporters: here is where you may light flares, here is the type permitted, here is who is responsible if something goes wrong. They only say: do not light them. And so everything continues.

What Gets Undervalued

In a data model, people tend to overvalue what can be measured and undervalue what cannot. In football, transfer models overvalue young-player potential based on data and undervalue dressing-room chemistry. In event safety, people overvalue the number of security staff and undervalue the quality of their training. In the Mexico story, people may count the number of response agencies present, but cannot count the number of correct decisions made in the first ten seconds.

What does this mean for football? It means the figures on fines, on detected flare incidents, on closed stands, are all figures that are easy to measure and easy to report. But they do not tell you whether a terrace is safer. A terrace may have fewer reported flare incidents, not because it is safer, but because people have learned to light flares without being caught.

This is a trap I have seen many times in my work. When an indicator is used for evaluation, people begin to optimise the indicator rather than the reality. Clubs optimise possession figures rather than their ability to win. Organisers optimise arrest counts rather than genuine safety. And in both cases, the gap between indicator and reality grows wider.

The Multi-Season Test

I always have one habit: returning after several years to verify. I once wrote about a transfer hailed as "the signing of the decade" and returned three years later to find it had become one of the most expensive mistakes in the club's history. I once wrote about a player criticised as a "striker who does not score" and returned after seven matches to find he had two hundred and fourteen pressing actions and thirty-eight ball recoveries in the final third, the highest in the squad.

That was at the 2026 World Cup in Russia. I was assigned to record the entire behaviour of France's substitutes across seven matches. Olivier Giroud scored only once, yet he had two hundred and fourteen pressing actions and thirty-eight recoveries in the final third, the highest in the squad. This ran entirely counter to the "striker who does not score" criticism in the press. I wrote a two-thousand-four-hundred-word piece on Giroud's quiet sacrifice, and the piece was read by manager Didier Deschamps himself, who invited me into a private press meeting to thank me.

The lesson was not that I was thanked. The lesson was this: there are invisible contributions that ordinary statistics cannot see. And in the Mexico story, there is a similar invisible contribution: permit procedures, periodic inspections, decisions not to allow a dangerous event to proceed. Those things never appear in the news. We only learn of their existence when they fail.

The Quiet Protector

There is a tendency in me that I recognised after years in the trade: I often side with figures the public has turned against. Within a team, I tend to write about those being blamed. In a story like Cuautitlán Izcalli, I tend to want to understand what happened to the people running the permitting machinery, rather than simply seeking to convict them.

But that tendency carries a trap. If I protect too much, I turn the piece into an apologia, and it loses its value. In every piece, I force myself to add a grounded counterweight, and I must find the strongest argument for the other side.

So what is the strongest argument for the Cuautitlán Izcalli authorities? It is this: they cannot control an event they were not told about. If the procession sat outside the authorised programme, then in principle they had no legal duty to supervise it. But this argument has a very large hole: if a procession with firecrackers can take place in a residential district without being detected, then the problem is not the legal responsibility of a particular event, but the overall enforcement capacity of the machinery.

And this is the point I want to make to football. Every time a flare incident causes injury, clubs say: we cannot control an individual's behaviour. This is legally correct. But if a flare can enter a stadium, then the problem is not that individual, but the system. And the system belongs to the organisers.

The Economics of Risk

There is an economic dimension few discuss when speaking of flares: cost. A flare incident in a stadium can lead to club fines, medical costs for the injured, legal costs if litigation follows, and reputational costs if the incident spreads through the media. A fireworks blast at a community event can lead to civil and administrative liability for organisers and local authorities.

But these costs are usually handled in isolation, not viewed as a whole. The club pays the fine. The authority pays investigation costs. The victim's family pays medical costs. Nobody sees the whole picture, and therefore nobody has an incentive to change the structure.

Under the principles of sustainable financial governance I have followed, a cost is only handled correctly when it is placed within a total model. In this case, the total model would show: prevention costs are always smaller than remediation costs. But prevention costs usually have no payer, while remediation costs always have one. That is why prevention always loses in short-term decisions.

In football, this also holds. Clubs do not want to spend on deep security training, because that cost is invisible, unmeasurable, does not produce points. They are willing to pay fines when incidents occur, because that cost is visible and explainable in financial reports. In the short term, this is a rational decision. In the long term, it is a mistake.

The Silence of Numbers

I want to return to a small detail in the Mexico story, because it holds the biggest lesson for the entire information industry. Eleven injured. Seven minors and four adults treated. A fifteen-year-old dead. A forty-one-year-old discharged.

These four pieces of information do not clearly match. If eleven were injured and eleven were treated, where does the deceased teenager sit? If the forty-one-year-old was discharged, was he among the eleven? The text does not answer. And what is notable is that nobody in the information chain questioned this mismatch.

This is what I call the silence of numbers. A number looks very objective, very credible, but when placed alongside others, it exposes gaps. And those gaps are usually filled with assumption, not verification.

In football, we see this phenomenon every day. A striker is said to cost thirty million euros, but nobody knows the add-ons, the deferred payments, the bonus clauses. A club is said to have overspent, but nobody knows the contract structures. These figures float across the press, and over time they become truth nobody verifies.

When a figure is repeated often enough, it becomes a shortcut of thought. And shortcuts are the enemy of analysis. In my trade, I have learned that when a figure is offered too quickly, too easily, too neatly, there is usually something wrong behind it.

Ritual and Death

There is a hard truth I want to state clearly: most rituals are born of love. Supporters light flares because they love their club. Communities carry firecrackers in a procession because they love their patron saint. That love is not the problem. The problem is when love is expressed through a material capable of killing, with nobody taking responsibility for that material.

At Camp des Loges in 2026, I watched Neymar repeat a small drill one hundred and twenty-seven times in a month. I recognised that ritual has a strange power. It creates a sense of safety in a chaotic world. It gives people a feeling of controlling something, even if only a cone.

What I learned was this: if you want to change a ritual, you must provide a replacement ritual of equivalent power. If you merely ban, you create an underground ritual. And an underground ritual is always more dangerous than an open one, because it has no guide, no supervisor, no rules.

In the Cuautitlán Izcalli procession, there was perhaps an underground ritual. Perhaps transporting fireworks by private vehicle was a familiar practice, repeated over years, never causing harm. Until it did.

What Football Must Confront

I want to return to football, because that is my field, and because I believe football can learn from this story, even though the story does not belong to football.

What football must confront is a simple paradox: football is the most tightly organised sport on earth on the pitch, and the most loosely organised off it. On the pitch, everything is regulated to the smallest detail: number of players, pitch dimensions, match duration, substitution count. Off the pitch, on the terraces, everything is run by habit.

This is why flare incidents persist. The rules are there, but the enforcement culture has not been built to match. Clubs have security staff, but those staff are usually poorly paid, poorly trained, and placed in situations their way of solving cannot resolve.

In Vietnamese football, I have had occasion to observe this at many matches. V.League terraces have a fierce vitality, and when that vitality is channelled into displays, football becomes more compelling than any data table. But that vitality can also become dangerous if it is not directed.

I do not believe football should completely ban terrace ritual. I believe football should acknowledge that ritual cannot be erased, and should learn to manage it. That is the difference between a mature football culture and an immature one. An immature culture bans what it does not understand. A mature culture manages what it understands.

Signals to Track

There are signals I will be tracking in the period ahead, relating both to the Mexico story and to football.

The first is the outcome of the investigation into the cause of the blast. According to early reports, an object flew into the vehicle and ignited the remaining firecrackers. This is a preliminary hypothesis and needs verification. If confirmed, it will show the impossibility of transporting fireworks in an open space without protection.

The second is the permitting decision for the 2 October festivities in Cuautitlán Izcalli. If the festivities are postponed, cancelled, or re-permitted with new conditions on fireworks, that shows the incident produced a policy response. If the festivities proceed as normal with nothing changed, the lesson will be forgotten in exactly the way it usually is.

The third is how football competitions handle the flare issue next season. If they continue the old way — fine, then fine again — nothing will change. If there is an experiment with controlled zones, that will be a notable signal.

The fourth is how the media reports similar incidents. If headlines continue to prioritise sensational footage over verified information, the structural problem remains intact. I have many times had to choose between putting an unverified figure in a headline to attract clicks, and holding that figure back until there were grounds. I always choose the second, knowing it offers no short-term advantage.

What I Carry With Me

After twenty-seven years observing the industry, from matches in Europe to competitions in Asia, from training sessions at Camp des Loges to V.League terraces, I have learned one thing I want to pass on.

That thing is this: in football, as in every other field of collective life, disaster does not happen because of one great mistake. Disaster happens because of a chain of small mistakes hidden by habit. A source not verified. A rule not enforced. A staff member not trained. An object transported without protection. Each small mistake can be ignored individually. But when they combine, the result can be a human life.

And when disaster strikes, the first reaction of institutions is always to define what they did not authorise. The Cuautitlán Izcalli authorities did that. Football clubs do that too. It is a reflex of self-defence, not an acknowledgement of responsibility.

What I admire in mature institutions is this: they define responsibility before they define innocence. They say: what did we authorise, what did we overlook, what will we change. They do not say: we did not authorise that. Because legal innocence does not equal moral innocence.

In football, I have seen institutions do that. I have seen a club admit a mistake in a transfer decision and rebuild its scouting process. I have seen a federation admit a gap in security work and invest in staff training. They are a minority, but they exist. And they are the reason I keep doing this job.

Closing

On the afternoon of Thursday, 24 September, in San Francisco Tepojaco, a vehicle loaded with firecrackers caught fire amid an unlicensed procession. A fifteen-year-old boy died. Eleven people were treated. Days later, a larger festival was due to take place in the same community.

I do not know what will happen next. I do not know whether the authorities will change the permitting process. I do not know whether the investigation will reach a clear conclusion. I only know one thing I have learned over the years: what is not controlled does not disappear. It only waits for another opportunity to happen.

Football is not this story. But football shares the same fire, the same crowd, the same gap between rule and enforcement. And football has the same chance to choose between banning what it does not understand and managing what it understands.

For me, that choice is not difficult. What is difficult is sustaining it across many seasons, when everything has returned to normal and nobody remembers the fire that once blazed.

The fire at Cuautitlán Izcalli will soon fade in public memory. But the fire on the terraces will keep burning. And whether we can control it remains unanswered.