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González assesses the 2025/26 season

The coach reviews the year and promises more to come in 2026/27

After many anxious weeks at the conclusion of the season, Manolo González could finally breathe a sigh of relief after the penultimate matchday, as the team got the required result to seal their top flight survival. Now, after his first meetings with new sporting director Monchi, he faces the prospect of continuing to lead the team forward next term.

"I'm happy because the season ended well. The team are consolidating our place in LaLiga, and that's the way that you can grow and take steps forward," explained the coach in his end-of-season address.

"I’m grateful for the confidence shown in me by both the president and the sporting director to continue for another year. This season was like ten years at once, so to speak. We started very well, and everything was going our way, then in the second half of the season we played better than the results suggest."

“We maybe had more points than we deserved in the first half of the season, but in the second half we deserved more. The team never gave up and ended up pulling through when it was most difficult, when we were hurting from the adverse results.”

González said he would rate the season as a whole as “7/10, because after the great first half, everything afterwards feels like a letdown. We wanted more, but we also have to consider it a positive that we improved both last year’s league position and points total.”

He admitted that during the run of poor results in the second half of the season, “anxiety” made him uneasy.

“We didn’t understand what was happening. Sometimes we looked for too many explanations, but if we had won the match against Athletic Club a month or two earlier, everything would have changed radically. We needed to win again to unblock ourselves mentally”

 “Our unity is a strength, and this club are increasingly united. We must always improve. I still say we're a sleeping giant, and we have to try to make this Espanyol better and better," he stated.

“Now I’ll have a holiday, but not in the usual way... There's a lot of work ahead. We’ll be looking for players who can help us go further and develop a different style of play -one closer to what we want. I hope that, when LaLiga resumes, the fans will still be invested in the team. We have that responsibility, from the sporting director to the coaching staff and the players. We have to give even more so that people continue to support us," he concluded.