Deportivo La Coruña’s search for shelter in time
There were plenty of reasons for them to give it a miss. Record high temperatures for October. One last dip in the Atlantic. A stroll along Europe’s longest promenade beneath the resisting autumn sun. A few Estrella Galicias in short sleeves out on the terraza. It’ll be a long winter up here. There’d be plenty more Sunday evenings when the beach on the other side of the Riazor turnstiles would be more like Cornwall in January than Copacabana.
It surely seduced a few sinners. Nonetheless, 25,672 souls — through obligation or blind devotion — were there to see Deportivo La Coruña host the kind of derby no team wants to play in: against their eternal rival’s kids.
“Today Fortuna come to town, but not the team from Düsseldorf,” wrote Arturo Lopez Petinal in DXT Campeón, A Coruña’s sports daily. He called the clash with Celta Fortuna as “the game of shame.”
“In my opinion, it’s the most complicated day of the year for Deportivo,” Ivan Antelo, a journalist for La Voz de Galicia tells me. “Some fans see it as a humiliation. For others, it’s an unpleasant dose that must be swallowed twice a year.”
In this part of Spain, it can often be tricky to get a straight answer from people (“In Galicia, it’s bad manners to speak clearly,” the A Coruña-born writer Nacho Carretero once said), but things were pretty black and white when I spoke to Benjamín Casteleiro of the Deportivo fan podcast Cuánto Sufrimos Martín. “For me, it’s the worst kind of derby,” he says. “You can win but you can’t take the piss out of your rival or have the banter in the office on the Monday. But if you lose, or even draw…”
The vital signs around Riazor were positive: a queue out the door of the club shop two hours before kick-off, and jovial fans in blue and white spilling from packed bars out onto the street. Men with grown-up children had dusted off and squeezed into football shirts from a time when Spain was transitioning from the peseta to the euro. Many of the shirts had the name of the man who was returning to the scene of his prime.
With one win from their opening six games, Depor had endured a bad start to their fourth season in the third-and-a-half tier of Spanish football (40 teams divided between two separate divisions with automatic promotion reserved only for the league winners). The hangover from last season’s playoff catastrophe kept hanging on, haunting those left behind. On a recent episode of Cuánto Sufrimos Martín, Benjamín Casteleiro said, “It’s like the players are seeing flashbacks from Vietnam.” The horror.
There we to be more flashbacks before the game of shame, but this time on the terraces. Standing on the halfway line with a blue and white shirt in one hand and his young daughter within grasp of the other, Djalminha watched a montage of his younger self on the screen overhead. Goals scored more than two decades ago were re-celebrated, there were gasps of awe at flicks and tricks and shaking of the hips — and that Lambretta v Real Madrid. Those around me, it seemed, would happily spend the rest of the evening down this warm and fuzzy memory lane rather than be jolted back to the cold, sobering reality of the present.
The returning Brazilian hero high-fived the Depor players as they stepped onto the field, a moment that connected the dots between the Depor delirium of the early noughties with the endless loop of disappointment of the past decade.
Today, Deportivistas, it seems, are content in their warm cave of the past for the time being. But it could have all been very different.
“We were earning minimum wage and bought a Mercedes.”
Augusto Cesar Lendoiro, Deportivo La Coruña president (1988–2014)
As part of its Classic Teams series, The Spanish Football Podcast dedicated an episode to Deportivo La Coruña and a bust-to-boom era spanning 12 years (1992–2004). Despite the remarkable longevity of the highs — this was no Blackburn Rovers — there was something very nineties about the wild abandon, vertigo, and gold rush giddiness of Depor’s rise which caught the wave of turbo-charged globalisation. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again,” writes Chuck Klosterman in The Nineties. Depor fans saw it all. They may never see it again.
This was a club that had spent 1973 to 1991 outside of Spain’s Primera division. But in June 1992, at the end of their first season back in the Primera, Depor had its sliding doors moment. After a 2–1 win in Galicia in the first leg of leg of the relegation/promotion playoff against Real Betis, Arsenio Iglesias’s men were able to hang on for a scoreless draw in Seville to retain its Primera status.
“¡Qué alegría, Martín, que alegría. Cuánto he sufrido, Dios mío!” It’s a line that has gone down in A Coruña folklore, the legendary local coach from nearby Arteixo expressing his suffering, relief, and joy while embracing his captain and Tom Selleck lookalike Martín Lasarte on the field of the Benito Villamarin. “The result released a special kind of euphoria because there was a feeling that things were suddenly about to change,” wrote Juan L. Cudeiro in Panenka. Nobody could have predicted either the scale or speed of the change that was coming.
The Brazilian international midfielder Mauro Silva had signed a pre-contractual agreement to join in the event Depor stayed in the division. Weeks later Bebeto would arrive after club president Augusto Cesar Lendoiro convinced the wife of the future World Cup winner to ditch Dortmund for Depor because A Coruña was basically a Galician Rio de Janeiro.
In his debut season, Bebeto was crowned Pichichi, his 29 goals guiding Depor to a top-three finish. They would lose the league title with the final kick of the following season, Miroslav Đukić’s missed penalty against Valencia crowning Barcelona as champions. But Depor, and the Galicia region, would only have to wait 12 months for its first major trophy, a Copa del Rey win against Valencia. It was a final that began on Saturday, June 24, 1995, and finished three days later after a biblical downpour in the Santiago Bernabeu halted play. The same venue was to be the scene of el Centenariazo in 2002, Depor winning the Copa del Rey against Real Madrid with Figo, Zidane, and Raul in the Bernabéu — on the day the hosts were preparing for the mother of all 100th birthday parties in the capital.
After relegation survival against Betis, one of Spanish football’s great “what-if” moments, Depor would finish in the top-3 in nine of the following 12 seasons, reaching ultimate glory in 1999/2000, winning the 69th edition of La Liga with 69 points. A decade later, Real Madrid would finish runners-up with 96 points. Super Depor quickly became Euro Depor with the likes of Pandiani, Valeron, Djalminha, Tristán, and Makaay putting A Coruña on the map for many football fans outside of Spain, myself included. They beat Bayern in Munich, United in Manchester, Juventus in Turin, and Arsenal at Highbury. They even got out of Dublin with a draw against Shelbourne.
The Champions League semi-final comeback against AC Milan was to be Depor’s highwater mark before a tsunami of debt began to clear everything in its path. Long before the Catalan palanca was invented, it was time to stop spending someone else’s money. Austerity had arrived.
“Deep down the city knew that we couldn’t keep it up, that we were dining in the wrong restaurant and sooner or later we would end up being kicked out.”
Nos parece mejor, Nacho Carretero.
“They were big. For a while, they were amongst the biggest. They weren’t called Super Depor for nothing,” wrote Sid Lowe, following Depor’s relegation to the Segunda for the first time in 20 years. “And now they’re gone.” Valencia (who else?) were to be the executioners on the final day of the 2010/11 campaign. Looking back on the six titles and the exorbitant debt accrued during his mandate, Panenka magazine referred to Augusto Cesar Lendoiro as the “best and worst president in the club’s history.” He would depart Depor with a debt of €160m in 2014. In Nos parece major, Nacho Carretero reflects on how, “Depor gave us the best and most unsustainable years.” The line from former Irish Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, “We all partied”, during Ireland’s banking crisis comes to mind.
Today, Deportivo La Coruña continues to pay the price for reckless mismanagement that was allowed to be glossed over for as long as the party was allowed to keep going. But eventually, someone always comes along to turn on the lights. “When a team goes from being in a Champions League semi final to the third tier of Spanish football in the space of 15 years it’s hard to create stability,” says Ivan Antelo. “There’s been multiple presidents and managers and endless player turnover.”
For the 2019/20 season Depor, changed their kit from vertical to horizontal stripes for the first time in over a century, and that’s when things really started to go sideways: suddenly they were Segunda bound. “Relegation was bad enough,” says Andrew Gillan, football writer and Deportivo La Coruña supporter. “But the worst thing about it was that it came in the midst of the reorganisation of Segunda B into what is now the Primera and Segunda RFEF and in a year where the pandemic-enforced abandonment of the previous season had seen the number of teams vastly inflated and a shambolic format which almost led to a humiliating double-relegation.”
In the summer after relegation to the Segunda back in 2011, Depor would see its record for season ticket sales broken. This past September, the club had 28,346 season ticket holders for its fourth season in the Primer RFEF, up almost 3,000 on the 2022/23 campaign. “En las malas mucho más,” as they say in Spanish — in the bad times you can count on us even more.
“For the people of A Coruña, Depor is like a friend or family member who needs help during a difficult period,” says Ivan Antelo. The La Voz de Galicia journalist adds that “Even those in the city who are not big fans of football hate seeing the team like this.”
Nowadays, A Coruña makes global headlines because of fashion rather than football thanks to Inditex (owner of Zara, Bershka, Pull & Bear, and Massimo Dutti). In a March 2023 feature, the Financial Times referred to the company as “a colossus among retailers,” detailing how its apparel and footwear enjoy a global market share of 1.6%. But here on the streets of the city, Depor the brand is as big as Zara or Estrella Galicia. In a country where too much attention is paid to only two football teams, it’s uplifting to be in a city where you’re either with Deportivo La Coruña or you’re with the rest.
“Where does this personal obsession with the past come from? Why does it pull me in, like a well I had leaned over? Why does it seduce me with faces that I know no longer exist? What is left there, that I didn’t manage to take? What´s waiting there, in the cave of the past?”
Narrator, Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov
Nostalgia, it seems, has been a coping mechanism that Depor, as an institution and fanbase, used to numb the pain of its traumatic recent past. However, it hasn’t helped matters on the pitch.
In 2020, the club released a collection of kits paying homage to its first Copa del Rey-winning team. In trying to recapture “the spirit of 95,” Depor almost suffered a double relegation. The death of the club’s most beloved coach, the man who helped create Super Depor, Arsenio Iglesias at the age of 92 last May was soon followed by an Ian Mackay goalkeeping disaster class and Depor suffering a playoff defeat in extra time for a second year running.
This past summer, it was time for a Brazil-themed away shirt dedicated to the club’s 1994 World Cup winners Bebeto and Mauro Silva. It’s estimated that the pair have accounted for 90% of the names printed on the yellow and green shirt. It’s clever marketing because nostalgia sells. This is, after all, Galicia, a region whose identity is inextricably linked to emigration and the notion of morriña — the longing for a land, a person, the past. A morbid, romantic, and fatalistic kind of melancholy. In Galicia: A nation between two worlds, Ramón Villares details how the population of Buenos Aires grew from 432,000 inhabitants in 1887 to 2.4 million in 1936. The city had an immigrant population of around 36% and, according to Villars, Galicians accounted for around 10% of this figure. Today, after Vigo and A Coruña, Buenos Aires is the third city home to the most Galicians. Spaniards are still collectively known as “Gallegos” in Argentina.
The 2023 winner of the International Booker Prize, Time Shelter, tells the story of Gaustine, a therapist “who was especially preoccupied with the past.” He soon creates a clinic for the past for those suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s, “for all those who are living solely in the present of their past.” But Gaustine’s plan doesn’t stop there: “Believe me, one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they start ‘losing’ their memories willingly,” he says. “The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. A time shelter.” He decides to scale up and create entire cities and countries set in a specific time. Across Europe, there are national referendums to decide what year from the 20th century daily life would be reset to. In A Coruña there’d be no arguments among Depor fans when choosing the decade at least.
“We’re living in Deportivo’s past, but the reality is we are now in Primera RFEF,” Pablo Martínez told La Voz de Galicia after Celta Vigo’s care-free kids rolled into town to take care of a stage fright-stricken Depor with minimal fuss.
“Riazor is amazing, but it’s not an easy place to play because of the expectation,” Depor manager Imanol Idiakez said after the game. “That obligation and the size and history of the stage weigh on the players, and their over-eagerness can cause a mental block.”
Talking about Depor’s recent decision to hire Joaquin Sorribas as the club’s full-time sports psychologist, Angeles Amor — an expert in the same field — told La Opinión A Coruña, “They are Segunda B players who play in front of a Champions League standard fan base.” Xane Silveira, a journalist for the same newspaper jokingly tweeted, “Any progress on a psychologist for the stands?”
Like Gaustine, Depor fans seem equally preoccupied with the past, about maintaining and protecting it. I asked Ivan Antelo why, despite the club’s terrible performances on the pitch over the last decade, the five most common ages among season ticket holders at Deportivo La Coruña all fall within the 14–18 age bracket. “We, the older fans, have taken on the responsibility to ensure that the connection endures. And the worse the situation gets, the more effort we make to explain that it will be them who help get the club out of the mess it’s in,” he says. “We’ve already seen the team win titles and play in the Champions League. Now it’s their turn.”
With names on shirts of players who retired before they were born on the club shop window, the children of A Coruña are re-living a past that isn’t theirs. Like us Italia 90 babies in Ireland, they inherit the nostalgia. But in Time Shelter, the narrator poses the question “How much past can a person bear?”
History, alas, is heavy, and it’s evident that, the longer Depor fans spend down in the warm cave of the past, the harder it will be to leave.
Perhaps Gaustine might be interested in pivoting to clinics of the future up here in Galicia to coax them back out.
