Inside Mexico’s 25,000‑seat Estadio Hidalgo, a massive tifo splashed a miner gripping a pickaxe and a crimped pastry across the stands. The striking black‑and‑white flag with a white cross, a distinctly Cornish emblem, sets the stage for CF Pachuca’s homage to the miners who helped bring football to the nation.
The link goes back to 1824, when John Taylor, a mining engineer from Cornwall, spotted Mexico’s ruined mines after its war of independence. He applied his expertise to the State of Hidalgo, inviting Cornish miners back and forth for over a century, sharing not just silver, but sport, culture, and customs.
Cricket to Football
The first sporting association tied to the Cornish miners in Hidalgo was a cricket club founded by Frank Rule in the late 1850s. By 1892, as local newspapers documented a “schism” among teams, it was clear that the football clubs were evolving from these cricket roots. Rule’s 1895 consolidation of the Pachuca Cricket Club, Pachuca Football Club and the Velasco Cricket Club birthed Pachuca Athletic Club.
Rule donated land for the club and, in keeping with his Methodist beliefs, demanded no Sunday games. By 1902, other clubs in Veracruz’s Orizaba joined forces to form Mexico’s first football league. Pachuca clinched the title in 1904–05, while the local club’s early rosters welcomed its first Mexican player, David Islas, in 1908 thanks to Alf Crowle, a Cornish miner turned player‑manager.
The club’s nickname, “Los Tuzos” (the gophers), nods to the mining heritage; the town’s pasty shops, still stocked with Cornish‑style beef‑and‑vegetable pasties spiced with chile, were seen as match‑day staples. A celebration of pasties—now a legal and cultural icon—continues with the Annual International Pasty Festival and pasty museum in Real del Monte.
Despite folding after 1922’s amateur era and a brief folding in 1950, the club relaunched in 1950 and then in 1960. It has since amassed seven Mexican league titles and the 2006 Copa Sudamericana victory. Alex Hernandez’s chant, “they founded the club from miners and brought the game to us,” crystallises the legacy that fans still celebrate.
Today, the Cornish‑Mexican bond continues. The Kernow Football Alliance plans a match between Cornwall’s team and Pachuca in Mexico to inspire the county’s future. Meanwhile, as Mexico prepares to host the 2026 World Cup—the first country to host it twice—fans on both sides anticipate seeing pasties beside the roar of football.
For Cornish residents, the heritage reverberates in families who grew up balancing Mexican flavours with Cornish identity, where pasties and Spanish mingle as fluently as football chants.
In the 2026 World Cup, as the tournament spreads on iconic pasties and the passionate colour of Mexican fans, the legacy of a miner’s pickaxe and a pastry threads through the trans‑Atlantic camaraderie that started in 1824 and endures to this day.
