It started as a joke although like most jokes there was something in it; beneath the smile, and the silliness, Cadiz striker Lucas Perez was deadly serious. A barbecue, maybe a beer or two, and an idea formed. It was early summer and the striker was chatting to his club president, Manuel Vizcaino. In a perfect world, Perez told him, I’d help Cadiz clinch survival in LaLiga, maybe score the goals that will save us, and then, when the season is over, join Deportivo la Coruna 1,000 kilometres away for the play-offs and help them get promotion to the second division.
Survival and promotion: what could be better?
So far, he only managed one of the two. Perez could still do both. Because this week that daft idea, that dream, became a little more real: not quite the way he imagined it perhaps, not quite the way he wanted it either, and certainly not as fast as he fantasised about, but it can happen. The man who helped secure survival for Cadiz last spring has now joined third-tier Deportivo on a €1 million transfer fee.
Which is the only thing he wanted, he said. And he didn’t just say it: he demonstrated it.
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Perez is from Coruna. Born and raised in Monelos out to the west of the city, the man who has the most koruño accent imaginable, he is a lifelong Deportivo fan soon to be a father who has already obliged his unborn son to be a fan too. He is also a former player at the club, albeit one forced to build a career elsewhere first, unable make his first Deportivo debut until he was 27. He has played there in two different spells: in 2014-2016 and on loan 2017-18. Both times he had to leave, against his will. His aim was always to return. Now he has.
At that barbecue in Cadiz, Vizcaino said he would grant him his wish if the conditions were right. The play-off plan wasn’t going to happen but if Cadiz survived and Deportivo went up, he promised he would allow Perez to go home and play there for the current season. Perez did his part. He scored the only goal in a 1-0 win over Barcelona in April, the first of a run of four games in which he scored or assisted. And on the last day of the 2021-22 season in May, Cadiz survived with a win at Alaves, a former club of Perez (and the place where he had started his career).
When he finally got the chance to play for Deportivo — taking a salary a quarter of the size of what he was offered in Greece — he made much of how it fulfilled him, how his family were happy just to have him around. They were no longer the Super Depor they had been, but they were a first-division team, the place he had always wanted to be. And in 2015-16, he was outstanding, scoring 17 goals in the league. In total he played 93 top-flight games, scoring 32 and assisting 20.
Which was both good and bad. Deportivo were in financial crisis. Arsenal paid his buyout clause and although he didn’t want to go, Lucas departed for London. The club had needed the money, so this was a service too. When he came back in 2017, it was on loan — prior to joining West Ham United. That year, Deportivo were relegated from the top flight, with him on the pitch, which hurt.
“Everyone keeps telling me I have a thorn in my side,” he said this week. “Every night I go to bed thinking about it.”
There is a sense of mission about this return, of putting things right. There is a euphoria, a gratitude, the sense that at last Depor can begin to return to where they should be. There has not been attention like this for years: the conference room looked like those Champions League nights they miss, many reporters said.
Yet if those days aren’t there any more, the fans remain. They have 24,000 season ticket holders in the third tier – “we’re a big club,” Perez insisted, quite rightly — a mass base bigger than anyone in Galicia, bigger than anyone even in the second division. One with a history, a loyalty that sets it apart, a feeling that can’t be extinguished. They can cling to him as the proof of that.
“This is not Lucas Perez’s club,” he insisted. “It is the city’s club, the fans’ club, the club of many kids, many mums and dads.
“People talk about this being me going to play in [the third division], but I don’t see it like that: I see it as going to play at Deportivo.”
