Given that they sold star striker Lucas Perez to Arsenal in last summer’s transfer market, without replacing him, Deportivo La Coruna’s goal at the start of the season was to avoid relegation and they managed it. In the end, Pepe Mel was the coach to ensure survival, having replaced Gaizka Garitano in the 21st round. The team were in 16th position at that point, the same place in the table where they’d finish, but there was a worry that disaster was just around the corner with Garitano, perhaps given the way his Eibar team collapsed at the business end of the season a couple of years previously in his last La Liga job. As such, Mel was hired and things started excellently, with the Galician side benefiting from the ‘new manager bounce’ and going undefeated across his first four matches, even drawing with Atletico Madrid and beating Barcelona. Just two wins and three draws followed over the following 11 games and they didn’t secure survival until the penultimate weekend of the season. As mentioned above, this was the objective at the beginning year so this has to go down as a successful year for the club.
The Lucas Perez issue was a difficult one to solve, though, and it took a while for new arrival Florin Andone to start scoring the goals and, even then, his tally of 12 was still quite some way behind Perez’s 17 goals scored the year before. Ryan Babel managed to contribute with four strikes from attacking midfield, but he was let go to Turkey in the winter transfer market, which caused a further creative deficiency for the team. That was their main issue, as they were usually fairly solid defensively, at least against the smaller teams of the division, but they lacked firepower up top.
