Antonio Hidalgo — The Coach Who Took Deportivo Back to La Liga

Antonio Hidalgo knows the Segunda División the way few working coaches do: roughly 400 matches of it as a player, spread across a career that started at La Masía and wound through Tenerife, Málaga, Zaragoza, Osasuna, Albacete, Sabadell and Cornellà. About fifty La Liga appearances sit in that record too. The rest is second-tier graft, which, in hindsight, reads like preparation.

Born in Granollers, outside Barcelona, Hidalgo built his coaching CV the same unhurried way. Local football first. Then Cyprus, as assistant to Imanol Idiakez at AEK Larnaca, a name Deportivo supporters know well, since it was Idiakez who later took Dépor out of Primera Federación in 2024. A promotion with Sabadell followed, sealed in a play-off against Barcelona B, then a short stop at Sevilla B.

The Huesca audition

What put Hidalgo on Deportivo’s radar was Huesca. With one of the division’s smaller budgets he turned the Aragonese club into the revelation of the 2024–25 Segunda, flirting with direct promotion for much of the season before falling away late. The football was recognisable week to week: a back three with aggressive wing-backs, disciplined pressing, and set pieces treated as a genuine weapon rather than an afterthought.

Deportivo hired him on 10 June 2025 on a 1+1 contract tied to objectives, the kind of deal a club offers when it wants to believe but has been burned before. Dépor had, after all, gone through coaches at a ruinous rate since 2018.

What he changed at Riazor

Hidalgo inherited a mid-table Segunda squad and made it a 77-point one inside twelve months. The mechanics of that are covered in the promotion season review; the shorthand version is that he gave a talented young core, Yeremay Hernández above all, a defensive structure worth attacking from. Nine defeats in 42 games was the division’s measure of it.

Just as telling: no public crisis, no dressing-room leaks, no month where the project wobbled badly enough to open the usual Spanish coaching-carousel speculation. At a club whose recent history is a catalogue of exactly those episodes, the quiet might be his most impressive result.

La Liga now asks a different question. Promoted coaches with a defined system tend to fare better in Primera than promoted coaches with only momentum, and a back three with wing-backs has aged well in Spain’s top flight. Whether Hidalgo’s version of it survives contact with elite wingers is the tactical subplot of Dépor’s season.

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