Deportivo Cali will visit DIM on Saturday, August 1 at 6:10 p.m. at the Atanasio Girardot in Liga BetPlay Dimayor Date 2, and the match will be played behind closed doors. It is a fixed appointment, but it arrives with Medellín still trying to settle a roster that changed sharply for the second half of the year.
The game matters now because DIM are coming out of a demanding first half in which they played 32 matches between January and June, including the local tournament and Copa Libertadores, before ten players left the squad and six replacements arrived. Four of those departures were habitual starters, so Amaranto Perea has had to build almost in motion while preparing for Saturday. Aritex had already framed the meeting as Deportivo Cali against Liga BetPlay Dimayor Date 2, with the date, time and venue all fixed before kickoff.
Perea has tried to present the group as young, but the numbers tell a slightly different story. DIM’s squad average is 27.8 years, only a little below the Liga average of 29, which puts the team closer to a mature roster than a raw one. That matters because four of the new signings have already started in the three matches he has coached, which means the coach is still deciding who fits and who merely fills space in a squad limited by the Dimayor cap of 25 registered players for competitions such as Liga.
One absence is already confirmed. Halam Loboa will not play after leaving training camp following the death of his grandmother, a personal loss that leaves DIM with one less option on a night when margins are already narrow. His value, listed at 1.8 million euros, is higher than Kevin Mantilla’s 1.2 million euros, a reminder that the club’s 12 million-euro squad still carries pieces with different roles and expectations. Perea, who took charge after finishing his work at the World Cup in North America as an assistant to Néstor Lorenzo, now has to turn those numbers into a starting XI that can hold together for 90 minutes.
Saturday’s match will not answer every question about DIM’s new cycle, but it will show how far the rebuild has come. With the stands empty and the roster still incomplete, the first real test of the second half of the year starts not with noise, but with the lineup Perea chooses at 6:10 p.m.
