Mirandes

Deportivo Alavés sits twenty minutes up the road, and since 2009 the fixture between the two has carried more weight in Miranda de Ebro than anything else on the calendar — the newer rivalry, sharpened by proximity, alongside the older provincial quarrel with Burgos CF. Neither has much to do with silverware. Mirandés has never reached La Liga.

What it has done, more than once, is turn a Copa del Rey draw into a nightmare for clubs that were supposed to win it easily. In the semi-finals of 2011/12 and again in 2019/20, a side from the third tier put out Celta, Real Sociedad, Sevilla and Villarreal in turn, earning itself the nickname "prince of cups". The players go by another name entirely at home: Los Jabatos, after the wild boar cubs of the surrounding countryside, chosen for the same reason — a willingness to fight above their station.

The club was formed on 3 May 1927 out of a merger of local sides, and its worst spell came far later, in 1994, when it collapsed out of the professional pyramid into regional football before working back up to the Tercera División by 1997. That pattern — falling hard, then climbing back — repeats. The closest Mirandés has come to the top flight was the promotion play-off final of 2024/25, lost to Real Oviedo. A year on, after renovation work at the Anduva stadium and three changes of coach inside a season, the club dropped out of Segunda into Primera RFEF.

Coaches and players have used Miranda as a launching pad rather than a destination: Andoni Iraola managed here before Bournemouth and now Liverpool, and Nico Jackson, Sergio Camello, Rodrigo Riquelme and Dani Vivian all passed through on their way to bigger clubs. What Mirandés itself has never managed, across nearly a century at the Anduva, is a single season in Spain's top division.