There was a moment late in Deportivo de La Coruña’s win over Barcelona on Sunday in which they got a corner and Lucas Pérez went to take it, gazing up at Riazor en route. When he got there, bouncing the ball before laying it down by the flag, he held out his arm for the linesman to inspect and leant in to whisper something. The linesman leant back, looked at the evidence presented and nodded. Then he smiled. It was true what Depor’s captain said: the hairs on his arm really were standing on end.
You and everyone else, Lucas.
It was 1-0, it was late and it was done. The title within their reach, the city exploding into the biggest party in years, Deportivo were back. On their way back at least. And so was everyone else, not just here but everywhere, a little part of all of them returning, the smile Pérez and the linesman wore shared, warmth spreading from this north-western corner right across Spain. The huge banner unfurled before their 36th game of the season had depicted Arsenio Iglesias and Bebeto above a line taken from the Galician anthem – Os tempos son chegados, the times have arrived – and it was right. Maybe not those times, but better ones.
This wasn’t Barcelona they had beaten, it was Barcelona B. The title they had just claimed wasn’t primera, it was Primera RFEF: Spain’s theoretically amateur third-to-fourth tier, a level where there are two divisions of 20 teams. But it was a start, and they had needed it. “Let this resonate around the world, let them know that Deportivo are coming back,” Pérez said, standing at the side of the pitch in this stadium by the sea, in this place known for nostalgia.
Deportivo were big once, Pérez knows. Born in Coruña, raised in one of the fisherman’s towers of Monelos, a couple of miles from Riazor – third floor, flat C – he had always watched them. They called Iglesias o Bruxo de Arteixo, the wizard from Arteixo – he passed away a year ago, aged 92 – and called the team he built, the one Pérez grew up with, Super Depor. Bebeto was their striker and Pérez’s idol, the first of three different Depor forwards to be top scorer in a decade, a man whose arrival alongside Mauro Silva changed everything. And, Celta fans apart, everyone felt something for them, had some soft spot somewhere.
It was not just here that hearts hurt when they were denied the league in the last minute of the last game in May 1994, Miroslav Djukic missing a penalty. The following year, a biblical storm storm stopped the Copa del Rey final, hail threatening to split players’ skulls, but Depor came back three days later, played 11 more minutes and lifted their first trophy. They won the league in 2000, by now under Jabo Irureta. As Pérez reminds everyone whenever he can, they remain one of only nine teams to do so. And they are surely the only one of the nine everyone welcomed: universally admired, the team to whom many felt football owed a debt.
They went to San Siro, Delle Alpi and the Parc de Princes, Highbury, Munich’s Olympic Stadium and Old Trafford and won. They reached a European Cup semi and were robbed of the final. They beat Real Madrid in the Copa del Rey final. At the Bernabéu. On Madrid’s 100th birthday. In five years from 1992, they twice finished second and twice third; in five from 2000, they were first, second, second, third and third.
And then, in 2011, Super Depor were gone, relegated from the first division.
It had been built on money they didn’t really have, or shouldn’t have had: a Galician tale of the 90s, beyond just football. The fall had been coming, a sense of loss over what they had been lingering, even as they resisted reality: eighth in 2005 and 2006, ninth in 2008, seventh in 2009. They came straight back in 2012, but went down again in 2013. Again, they returned, but this was not the same. And in 2018, they fell into the second division again. They have not been back.
A last-minute header from Pablo Mari in the second division playoffs in 2019 could have lifted them back into the first division, but it flashed past the post. Within a year, denied the chance to play their final game against Fuenlabrada because of the Covid pandemic, Deportivo slipped into the third tier and then almost the fourth, only just surviving the cut when the pyramid was restructured in 2021. The level they play in now, run by the federation not La Liga, is not even considered professional.
Which is where Pérez came in, dropping from the first division to the third in January 2023 to try to bring them back. But he insisted: “It’s not me going to Primera RFEF; it’s me going to Deportivo.” He had, he said, thought about it every night for years, an idea born in the good times but in the bad times more.
When Pérez was growing up, his dad was out to sea. His mum was absent, the relationship irrecoverable. He was raised by his grandfather and his grandmother, who who passed away when he was 14 and 16 respectively, in a tough neighbourhood with a drugs problem and where he played football better than anyone else. He played for Arteixo and for Vitoria, local teams, and wanted to play for Deportivo, but they did not have a side for his age group. He left at 16, went to Atlético and Rayo. He went to Ukraine where he felt abandoned and lost, unpaid and alone. He went to Greece, which was a relief. And then, in 2014, he made it to Deportivo, finally making his debut aged 27.
“It’s my club, it’s just that it’s taken me a long time to get here,” he said, his accent as koruño as they come.
In 2014-15, he scored a belting goal at the Camp Nou to help keep Depor up on the final day. In 2015-16, he got 19 goals and 11 assists. One day he got a letter from Bebeto, the player he had first seen at Riazor aged four, welcoming him to the club’s history after he, like the Brazilian, had scored in seven consecutive games. Pérez was just happy to be home, he said, but by the end of the season he had gone again. He hadn’t really wanted to go but it was a huge opportunity and, at €20m, Deportivo could not afford not to sell him to Arsenal.
When the first season in London did not work out, Pérez pushed for them to let him return on loan. They did but everything was falling apart. The best touch anyone at Depor produced all season came from Clarence Seedorf, and he was their manager.
Pérez got eight goals and six assists but it was not enough and it was not good. One day someone spray-painted abuse on the side of a house. As Juan Cudeiro recalled in El País this week, one day he threw his shirt into the stands and they threw it back. At the end of the season, Deportivo were relegated, a thorn in his side he couldn’t remove. “I can’t ever forget it,” he insisted, but it inspired him, determined to somehow make things right.
At a barbecue when he was playing for first division Cádiz, he told the club president, half-joking but deadly serious, that he had this dream. He would keep Cádiz up and then go to Coruña to play in the playoffs and help bring Depor up from Primera RFEF to the second division, two teams saved in a month. That didn’t happen – Pérez did his part for Cádiz, then had to watch from the stands as Depor lost in extra time against Albacete, crying on the way home – but the idea was there and he was not going to let go.
Nor were Cádiz. They needed him, after all: he was their top scorer. They pointed to his buy-out clause: €1m. They offered him a new contract, better than anyone in the team. They tried to shame him into staying but Pérez kept on. And on New Year’s Eve 2022, he left for home, taking a ten-fold pay cut. He paid half of the buy-out clause – €493,000 – himself. Thousands came to his presentation, the queue stretching round the stadium. “And only Bebeto ever had that,” he said.
“I wanted to be here, I wanted to help,” he said, and he was not alone. In his first game, he faced tiny fan-owned Unionistas de Salamanca; more people were there that day than watched Real Madrid, and that’s a recurring theme. Depor’s average gate this season is 23,177, which is more than their last two years in primera, support when it is most needed, and more than half of the current top flight. They have 29,000 season ticket holders. In short, they were too big for Primera RFEF. So too is he.
Or so it goes, but football has its way. In last year’s playoff semi-final, Depor won the first leg 1-0 at home against Castellón; 2-0 down in the second, Pérez scored the penalty that might have seen them through before it went wild; eventually they were beaten 4-3. Two years running, they had fallen, and this season didn’t start much better. At Christmas, the coach was on the edge, the team struggling. They lost to Celta B, a humiliation. Pérez didn’t score until 4 January.
But then, when he did, he didn’t stop. In 15 games, he scored 12 and provided 10 assists. On Sunday, in front of 31,833 people, the highest crowd the third tier had ever seen, he curled in a brilliant free-kick, dashing off to, well, anywhere really, to his people. It had to be him. The ballboys grabbing him and hugging him hard. When they let go, he stood, listened to Riazor call his name, and then roared: “God!” There were tears everywhere.
“I’m home and I’m happy, and the most important thing is that Coruña is happy,” he said later and everyone else, it seemed, was happy for them. All that was missing, he said, were his grandparents, who had given him everything.
And as the final seconds slipped away, through the nerves, the fear and the nostalgia, they realised that, after all that, they were actually going to do this; that times had arrived. Not those times, no, but happier times. And so they sang and they cried and they won a corner and Lucas Pérez showed the linesman his arm. This was his story, the kind that makes your hairs stand on end, and it was true.
