Deportes Copiapó

In 1998, Copiapó had a first-division football club, and then it did not. Regional Atacama folded under debt and dropped out of Chilean football entirely, leaving the biggest city in the Atacama region without a team of its own. Deportes Copiapó was registered on 9 March 1999 — not as Regional Atacama's legal heir, since the old club's history and assets stayed where they were, but as a fresh start meant to fill the same gap. It was, as it happens, the first football club in Chile incorporated as an S.A.D.P., a sporting joint-stock company, a structural detail that mattered more to lawyers than to supporters.

Two lost Tercera División finals, in 2000 and 2001, came before the one that counted: in 2002 Copiapó beat Malleco Unido 7-1 to win the division outright. Promotion and relegation between the second and third tiers followed for the next two decades, with further final defeats in 2012, 2017 and 2021 — the last of those a play-off loss to Curicó Unido and Coquimbo Unido for a place among Chile's elite.

That place arrived the following year. In 2022, under the Argentine coach Héctor Almandoz — a Vélez Sarsfield player when the club won the Intercontinental Cup in 1994 — Copiapó won the Primera B and reached the Primera División for the first time in the 23 years since its formation, fielding a squad built largely around players who had come through Colo-Colo. The stay lasted a single season; Copiapó went back down at the end of 2024. Matches against Cobresal, from nearby El Salvador in the same region, are still contested as the Clásico Atacameño.

By 2025 Copiapó were back in the second tier, playing out of the Estadio Luis Valenzuela Hermosilla.