Chivas and the five-match unbeaten run: Gabriel Milito is rebuilding El Rebaño from the basement, not from the front line

The day Guadalajara lost 2-0 to Toluca, nobody at Estadio Akron imagined that a few rounds later their team would be the only club in Liga MX still carrying a live unbeaten streak. That is exactly what happened in the Apertura 2026. After that fall against Toluca, Chivas entered the decisive stretch of the tournament with five consecutive matches without defeat, two clean sheets in their two most recent outings, and six goals in those same two games.

For a club that has been doubted by its own supporters more than any other in Mexico, this is the kind of data that forces you to stop and read more carefully instead of nodding it through.

I have spent most of my career watching big South American clubs fall into and climb out of runs like this, from the Brasileirao to the Mexican leagues. What I learned is simple: an unbeaten run never tells a story about form. It tells a story about structure. When a team wins five games, people credit spirit or momentum. Momentum does not keep clean sheets. Structure does.

What actually changed in Guadalajara is not in the attack. It is that this team stopped depending on a single individual to produce goals.

Context: a league that lives on short cycles

Liga MX runs on two short tournaments per year, Apertura and Clausura, with a regular phase followed by the liguilla. That format gives every streak far more psychological weight than a 38-round European season. In Europe you can drop three games and still have twenty left to fix things. In Mexico, five matches is nearly a third of the regular season, and it is enough to define a club's entire position before the knockout phase begins.

Guadalajara entered the Apertura 2026 with a list of problems longer than its list of solutions. The club is one of the two most heavily supported institutions in Mexican football, and that is precisely why pressure here is not measured in table position but in historical expectation. An ordinary team wins three in a row and gets praised. Chivas win three in a row and get asked why not five.

This run started from a defeat. The 2-0 loss to Toluca early on was not an isolated accident. It exposed two problems at once: a defensive line stretched whenever the midfield lost the ball high up the pitch, and an attack with no alternative plan once opponents locked the vertical spine. That is the kind of defeat an experienced coach reads as a design flaw, not as bad luck.

Gabriel Milito read it that way.

How the run was assembled

The recovery path ran through five matches with very different characteristics. First came the win over Juarez, where the important thing was not the scoreline but the fact the team stopped leaving gaps behind its midfield line. Then came wins over Santos and Tijuana, where the attack began finding its vertical passing rhythm again instead of meaningless sideways circulation.

Then came the two matches that changed the numbers: a 3-0 win over Atletico de San Luis, followed by a 3-0 win over Pumas. Six goals scored, none conceded across the last two games. For a club famous for conceding at absurd moments, two consecutive clean sheets carries more weight than any possession statistic.

The recent window of activity also includes draws against Puebla and Pachuca. How you count this streak depends on which starting point you choose, and that deserves to be said plainly: the figure of five matches is being used as the currently valid reference, while the draws sit inside the same period of activity. As an observer, I care more about the nature of the period than about the framed number. What stands out is that Chivas are now the only Liga MX club still holding a live unbeaten run of that length after the most recent round.

What actually changed in the operating model

Look only at the scorelines and you would think Chivas are playing blazing attacking football. They are not. This team is playing risk-controlled football, and six goals in two games is the result of risk control executed properly, not of throwing bodies forward.

Three specific changes explain most of this run.

First, the distance between midfield and defence has been compressed. When the team loses the ball, the midfield drops immediately instead of attempting an instant counter-press. That is an unglamorous choice, but an effective one: it takes away the opponent's transition space and pays for it by forcing the team to build attacks against an organised block.

Second, Chivas stopped depending on a single focal point. When Armando Gonzalez left Guadalajara for European football, that was a real loss. He is the kind of striker any club wants to keep, and losing a player like that usually has a direct effect on goal output. What happened instead was the opposite: the team found more options rather than finding one replacement.

An attack that depends on one player is easy to lock down. An attack that depends on a structure can only be locked down another way, and that other way costs far more.

Third, Chivas started winning set pieces and second balls. This is the detail media skip because it is not pretty, but in a league where teams defend in blocks, second balls are where goals are born. The three goals against San Luis and the three against Pumas came largely from winning secondary duels around the edge of the box.

Roberto Alvarado and Ricardo Marin: two different jobs in one system

Roberto Alvarado and Ricardo Marin are both among the team's main scorers this tournament, but they do completely different jobs, and misreading that means misreading the whole system.

Alvarado is a ball carrier. He is not the man who finishes moves by finding space in the box; he is the man who drags the entire opposing defensive block off its vertical axis. Every time Alvarado receives between the lines, the opposing back line must choose: hold shape and let him advance, or step out and expose the space behind. There is no correct answer to that question, and Alvarado's value lies in forcing opponents to answer it repeatedly.

Marin plays the opposite role. He is the anchor, the man who occupies the space between two centre-backs, draws attention and opens room for others to run into. In matches where Chivas face a deep block, Marin's role matters more than his goals. A striker who does not score can still be the most influential player on the pitch, and this is a textbook case.

The interplay between those two explains why Chivas can score three without anyone grabbing a hat-trick. In modern football, a balanced attack is an attack with no dead spot.

Santiago Sandoval and the youth development question

Santiago Sandoval's brace against Pumas was the most significant moment of the whole run, and I want to discuss it differently from how the news wires will. The wires will talk about a young talent exploding. I want to talk about a structure that allows that young talent to exist.

A young player scoring twice only matters if the system around him is solid enough not to turn him into a burden-carrier. At many South American clubs, a youngster who scores a brace is immediately pushed into a leading role, starting every game in a congested calendar, and by the fourth month a body that has not finished growing pays the price. I have seen that pattern far too often, in Brazil as much as in Mexico.

What is admirable about Milito is how he introduced Sandoval: not as a saviour, but as one option inside a collective. That is the difference between developing a player and consuming one.

Young players who develop early are routinely overused, and the concern is not the first match but the twentieth. A brace against Pumas is a good signal. But a good signal only retains its value if the coaching staff controls Sandoval's minutes over the next three months, especially during the liguilla when pressure doubles and the safe instinct is to use young legs more than necessary.

The basement: where this run is really built

Chivas are not keeping clean sheets because the attack scores a lot. They are keeping clean sheets because the defensive structure works before the ball even gets near the goal.

There is one metric I always track when evaluating a South American defence: the number of times opponents touch the ball inside the box without pressure. It appears in almost no public stat sheet, yet it is what separates a lucky defence from an organised one. In Chivas' recent games that number has dropped noticeably, and that is the real reason behind two clean sheets.

In Liga MX, where many teams sit deep and wait for a single flash to counter, controlling the box becomes a core skill. Chivas are building that skill, but quietly: no centre-back is emerging as a media star, no tackle is going viral. Only structure.

And this is where I want to bring up something Brazilian football fans call the football the rich do not want to understand. A team does not need beautiful moments to take points. It needs correct moments. Chivas are playing correct football, and precisely because it is not glamorous, it gets undervalued.

The five-substitution rule and the final twenty minutes

There is a tactical detail rarely mentioned in this story: the five-substitution rule.

The rule favours deep squads, allowing a coach to overhaul an entire midfield on 65 minutes without breaking structure. But it also turns the final twenty minutes into a war of attrition, where the team with more bench options can keep pumping fresh energy into the game while the other side endures.

For Chivas, that advantage cuts both ways. On one hand, Milito has enough resources to rotate and keep his midfield from being wrung dry across a congested run. On the other, that rotation raises a stability question: a structure built on mutual understanding between lines loses some of its value when the links change constantly.

Notably, Chivas did not concede in either of their last two games despite rotating. That is a positive signal about squad depth, but also a warning: depth only has value when it does not break the principle. If Milito starts rotating because of fixture pressure rather than match planning, this run will end in a way nobody wants.

Rhythm, VAR and the cost of accuracy

One more element belongs in this picture: VAR.

Excessively long VAR reviews are shredding the rhythm of matches. Two minutes of waiting is enough to cool a goal, and the effect is uneven. For teams that play structurally and rely on sustained pressure, a two-minute stoppage mid-second-half can break an attacking wave entirely. For teams that defend and protect a scoreline, that stoppage is a gift.

Chivas have benefited from such stoppages more than they have suffered during this run. That is not a criticism of the club; it is an observation about how the laws of the game create systematic advantages for a certain type of team. And when a club is riding an unbeaten run, people rarely want to say that out loud.

I do. Because a streak is only worth analysing if we read the factors outside the players' feet as well.

The contrarian angle: where I could be wrong

This is the section I always have to write, even when it weakens my main argument.

First, opposition quality. These five unbeaten matches were assembled against Juarez, Santos, Tijuana, Atletico de San Luis and Pumas. Those are opponents a club like Chivas is expected to beat. A pretty run against mid-to-lower opposition does not answer the biggest question: what happens when Chivas face a side capable of pressing hard for ninety minutes?

Second, sample size. Two clean sheets is two matches. In Mexican football, two matches do not make a trend, especially when the back line has not seen significant personnel change. If two games were enough to prove a defence is complete, this league would produce dozens of perfect defences every season.

Third, and this is the counter-argument I find most convincing against myself: the liguilla is a different sport. Knockout football does not reward structure, it rewards the ability to handle moments. A team unbeaten in five regular-season games can be eliminated over two legs by an eighth-placed side with one striker who knows how to score in the 88th minute. Chivas have not proven they have that, and no regular-season run can prove it for them.

Fourth, Armando Gonzalez's departure. I wrote above that the team found more options rather than a replacement. That is the optimistic reading. The pessimistic reading is this: Chivas lost a striker of the calibre to decide a big match, and in knockout football a player like that is worth more than a balanced system. If Milito enters the liguilla without anyone capable of producing a decisive moment, this unbeaten run becomes a nice memory and nothing more.

I could be wrong about the fourth point. But if I am right, it is the most important thing in this entire article.

The escape window

If the current plan collapses, Chivas do not need a revolution. They need an adjustment.

The escape window sits in Sandoval's position. If the attack stalls in the knockout phase, the sensible solution is not to drop Marin deeper or let Alvarado carry the entire creative load. The sensible solution is to pair Sandoval with Marin in a two-striker shape, turning Alvarado into a left-sided supplier who pulls the opposing block away from the central axis.

This does not require changing the philosophy. It requires the courage to admit that a young player in good form deserves more than a few closing minutes.

There is a human cost here I do not want to skip: pushing a young player into a decisive role in the knockout phase is a risk physically and mentally. If Sandoval fails, he carries it into next season. If he succeeds, he will be asked to succeed forever. Neither option is harmless.

But football does not offer a choice between harmless options. It only offers a choice between less risky ones.

What to watch over the next three rounds

Guadalajara enter the next stretch in a position they have not held for several seasons: as the team being studied, rather than the team doing the studying.

From here, three indicators will say more than any scoreline.

First, the number of unpressured opponent touches inside the box. If it keeps falling, Milito's defence is real.

Second, Sandoval's minutes per match. If that number climbs gradually along a sensible curve, the staff is managing a young player correctly. If it jumps, they are consuming a young player exactly along the pattern South America has repeated far too many times.

Third, and most importantly, how Chivas respond when they go behind. An unbeaten run built on never trailing says little about character. An unbeaten run built on trailing and still recovering results says everything.

I have watched South American football long enough to know that champions are not the teams with the longest streaks. They are the teams that know where their streak ends, and prepare for that day before it arrives.

Gabriel Milito has three rounds to prove he knows that. Mexico's giants do not win titles by going unbeaten for five games. They win titles by not collapsing in the sixth.

And if this run ends next weekend, the real question will not be who ended it. The question will be whether Chivas can keep the frame that carried them through the easiest stretch of their season.