Espanyol face Athletic needing a win to avoid what could be their first drop into the relegation zone after the next matchday, with their buffer down to two points and the margin for error gone. The meeting carries the feel of a survival game because the team that was flying in December has spent the weeks since then sliding back toward danger.
That urgency sits on top of a remarkable contrast. On 22 December, Carlos Romero and Pere Milla scored in a 1-2 comeback win at San Mamés that gave Espanyol a fifth straight victory, their best run of this century. It was a sequence that matched the club’s previous benchmark of six straight wins under Miguel Ángel Brindisi in 1998-99 only in spirit, not in length, and it looked like the kind of stretch that would carry them clear of trouble.
Instead, the picture has changed fast. Espanyol collected 60 points from 37 matches in 2025, then reached Christmas with 33 from 17 and sitting fifth. Since that pre-Christmas triumph, they have taken only six points from 54 available and have squandered 48 of the 54 points on offer. Their winless run stretched to three after the Girona match, and the warning signs are now hard to ignore.
Manolo González knows the scale of the climb because he lived the club’s last escape from the drop. His top-flight debut came a season and a half before this match, and he later oversaw survival at the last moment before the current campaign. LaLiga rewarded that work on 16 January, naming him its December manager at the RCDE Stadium before Espanyol faced Girona, but the recognition has not stopped the slide since then. Monchi, meanwhile, has been installed as the club’s new director general for sport, adding another layer of change around a team that suddenly looks very different from the one that went into the winter break.
González has tried to keep the target plain. He said he would not look beyond reaching 42 points, and that once Espanyol got there they would keep working to go as far as possible, prioritising the basic objective and taking it step by step. That is the tension hanging over the Athletic match: a side that once looked capable of pushing upward now has to prove it can simply stay up. The next result will not decide the season, but it will show whether Espanyol still control their fate or are already being pulled into the fight they thought they had escaped.
