Deportivo’s 2025–26 Segunda Rivals — Where Are They Now

Promotion races create strange intimacies. For ten months, Deportivo supporters checked Racing Santander’s results before their own breakfast, treated Almería’s slip-ups as personal gifts, and developed opinions about Castellón’s away form that no neutral would bother holding. Then the season ends, and the whole cast scatters.

A few months on, this is where the 2025–26 Segunda’s protagonists landed.

The ones who came up

Racing Santander won the title with 82 points, five clear of Dépor, and did it playing the division’s most watchable football. Primera has been harder on them: after ten matchdays they sit 13th on 11 points, level with Dépor, and their 26 goals conceded are the most in the league. Málaga took the long route through the play-offs from fourth place, past Las Palmas and then Almería, completing a return from their own third-tier exile that mirrors Deportivo’s: two fallen giants back in Primera the same summer. Their first ten games have brought five draws, no win and last place.

And Dépor’s own path (second place, 77 points, promotion sealed at Zorrilla) is reviewed in full here.

The ones who fell short

Almería may look back on 2025–26 as the one that got away: third with 74 points, a squad built for automatic promotion, and a play-off final lost to Málaga. Las Palmas (73) and Castellón (72) completed the play-off picture. Eleven rounds into the new Segunda, two of the three are back near the top: Castellón lead on 26 points, Almería are second on 25. Las Palmas sit 14th with 14.

There is a lesson in that group that Deportivo supporters will recognise from 2019: the Segunda punishes squads assembled to go up. Wage bills sized for Primera meet a second consecutive year of second-division income, and the rebuild becomes harder, not easier. Las Palmas, in their second season since relegation, are living that version. Almería and Castellón have answered the play-off disappointment by going straight back to the top of the table; whether that lasts into the spring is the real question of their season.

The rivalry that survives the divide

One fixture Deportivo lose by going up: the Galician derby stays split across divisions unless Celta and Dépor meet in Primera. For the first time since 2018, they do. Riazor against Celta as a top-flight fixture again is arguably the single best consequence of this promotion for the neutral. For everyone in A Coruña, “neutral” is not the applicable word.