“We pushed it since you made us see that what we saw as something minor was a big mistake,’’ the soccer federation’s press officer, Israel Márquez, said.

We asked Ms. Chavira to tell us about the accent kerfuffle, and how she also became a well-respected grammar cop.

Q. On Twitter you said you were crying with emotion over the inclusion of accent marks on the jerseys of the Mexican national soccer team. I cry, too, when I get accent marks correct. But why was that so important and what role did you play in getting them?

I’m a grammar obsessive, passionate about Spanish and soccer and the richness of both. What’s more, “futbol” is one of the most important sports in Mexico: the one with the most followers and the one that’s most widely seen.

That the national team players’ names are accurately written is a way of inviting people to nurture our language and to highlight the importance of writing it correctly. A simple accent may seem trivial for a lot of people, but its presence or its absence changes the way we pronounce a word, and sometimes even its meaning.

The press chief for the Mexican Football Federation told me the absence of the accents was due to the fact that the players’ names had no accents on their passports, so the players had been registered that way. That mistake then ended up on the jerseys.

We dug into the reason they don’t write the accents on official documents and how that is an error in itself. We published an article, which was one of the most read for The New York Times en Español last summer.