Deportivo Back in La Liga — Everything That Changed Since 2018
August 19, 2026 · Mark
Eight years is long enough for a club to become a different institution. The Deportivo that kicks off the 2026–27 La Liga season shares a stadium, a badge and a fanbase with the one relegated in May 2018, and not much else.
Consider what sat between those two points. Not one relegation but two: after dropping out of La Liga in 2018, Dépor went down again in 2020, out of professional football’s second tier for the first time in four decades. Three seasons followed in the third category (first Segunda B, then the rebranded Primera RFEF) against opponents like Unionistas and Rayo Majadahonda, in front of Riazor crowds that still ranked among Spain’s twenty biggest. That mismatch between stage and audience defined the era.
The near-misses
The road back was not a straight line, and pretending otherwise flatters nobody. The 2019 promotion play-off ended in a collapse against Mallorca that older supporters still rank among the club’s most painful nights. The Segunda B years brought their own play-off heartbreaks before the corner finally turned.
It turned decisively in 2023–24: champions of Primera Federación, back to Segunda. A year of consolidation followed in 2024–25. Then Antonio Hidalgo arrived in June 2025 and delivered second place and 77 points at the first attempt, the full promotion season is reviewed here.
What actually changed
Three things separate the 2026 club from the 2018 one.
The squad logic. The 2018 side was an aging, expensively assembled group in decline. The 2026 side was built the other way: a young core, headlined by Yeremay Hernández, supplemented rather than replaced in the transfer market.
The bench. Between 2018 and 2025 the club burned through coaches at a rate that made any project impossible. Hidalgo’s 1+1 contract, extended by results, is the first time in years that the identity of the team outlasted a single season’s turbulence.
The institution. Ownership stabilised under Abanca through the lean years, the banking group’s backing kept a third-tier club running a top-flight infrastructure. Whether that patience gets rewarded in Primera is now the question the 2026–27 season answers.
There is also an unglamorous constant worth naming: the fanbase never shrank to fit the category. Riazor averaged crowds through the Primera RFEF years that most Segunda clubs would take today. Institutional memory did the rest, a club that won the 2000 league title does not internally recalibrate to third-tier expectations, for better and occasionally for worse.
The eight-year absence ended in Valladolid in May. What it left behind is a leaner, younger, more coherent club than the one that went down. Primera will test exactly how much of that holds.