CELTA’S GREATEST RIVALRY: DEPORTIVO DE LA CORUÑA

If you ask a Celta supporter which is the most important match of the year, they won’t talk about Real Madrid or Barcelona, he will tell you the match against Deportivo is the most important match of the year. The neighbour rival, just 150 km away from Vigo, and located in Galicia as well, is Celta’s arch rival, with a rivalry that comes from very long ago.

Orinally, there were two teams in Vigo, Vigo Sporting and Real Fortuna, that in 1923 decided to join forces becoming a new team that was called Celta de Vigo. Just days before the union, Vigo sporting had become Galician Champion. When Celta´s squad was decided, and the captains chosen, Silver medal winners, Luis Otero and Pasarin, not all the players were happy with that situation, and four of them, bribed by Deportivo, decided to leave the team and join the team from Coruna, being Luis Otero one of the players.

Celta decided to denounce Deportivo to the Spanish Football Federation, and the departure of the four players had a huge impact not only at a local level, but national newspapers made a huge deal out of it. The Spanish football federation give Celta the reason, and forbide the four players to play for any other team rather than Celta for a year, not allowing them to play even friendly games. Just one of the players, goalkeeper Isidro decided to come back to Celta, with the other three accepting the one year ban, joining Deportivo the next season.

But Deportivo took revenge, and when Celta was created, they had the right to play in the first league due to city´s size and population (that was how it worked in 1923 for new teams from big cities), but needed the vote from the rest of the teams of the league. Among those teams was Deportivo, who voted against Celta, and so the team from Vigo started playing in lower divisions.

So really the rivalry between Celta and Deportivo started since the very first moment Celta de Vigo was created, and has never been solved through the years. There has always been controversy in some of the signings that Deportivo made from Celta with one of them being Goran Djorovic, who left Celta after finishing his contract to sign for Deportivo.

This rivalry has been very vivid lately, and last season, after achieving promotion both teams, in their celebration parties had words for their rivals that created a lot of controversy. As a curious fact, Deportivo’s supporters call Celta fans Portuguese, and Celta fans called them Turkish.