MLR to Mexico? Potential Monterrey-Based Club Eyeing 2025 Start

After a dreadful month for North America’s top professional rugby league, Major League Rugby got some much-needed potential good news as a possible Mexico-based expansion team has expressed hopes to join the league in 2025.

International law firm Cuatrecasas (which has an office in Mexico City) announced earlier this month that it had advised Rugby Ventures Mexico to sign a contract with the Nuevo Leon Institute for Physical Education and Sports (INDE) “to enable its rugby team to play at the new facilities INDE is building.”

Such a deal, the firm claims, would enable a Monterrey-based team (currently unnamed) to begin play in MLR starting in 2025. No Mexican side has competed in MLR history since the league’s first season in 2018.

An MLR spokesperson could not be reached for comment at the time of writing.

The contract signed, per Cuatrecasas’ statement, would also enable Rugby Ventures Mexico to obtain financial support thanks to the facilities and the construction improvements to the new stadium” based in Monterrey, the capital of the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon and the country’s second-largest city behind Mexico City.

Monterrey is roughly 140 miles from Mexico’s border with the United States and shares a time zone with MLR cities Chicago, New Orleans, Houston and Dallas. Houston, roughly an 8-hour drive away, would be Monterrey’s closest MLR market.

 A Mexican team would return the MLR to being an international league after its only non-American team, the Toronto Arrows, folded late last month ahead of the 2024 season. That news was compounded with former league champion Rugby New York’s decision that it was also going to fold just days later, leaving the MLR with just 11 clubs and a shaky future with the 2024 campaign just weeks away.

A fully professional side would also be a massive step forward for Mexico’s rugby culture and development as the country currently does not have a club in either the MLR or Super Rugby Americas, which features teams from both the U.S. and South America. Mexico’s national team, Los Serpientes, is currently ranked 49th in the World Rugby Rankings and has never qualified for a Rugby World Cup.