One of the first things I ever wrote about Spanish football was a short series on Spanish internationals who played just before Spain’s period of international success beginning in 2008. The biggest takeaway from that was the amount of Valencia players who made the cut, and just how impressive the club was in the early 2000s. Now in the early 2020s, the club is currently in the LaLiga relegation zone, with little hope that things will get better. So, how did they go from European success to staring down the barrel of the Segunda and financial disaster?
A recent history
Valencia have faced a fall from grace before, going down in the mid-1980s, having enjoyed a period of success in the late ’70s. The club began its modern rise in the 90s. The early part of the decade would be characterized by the club doing well, but not quite good enough in order to win a trophy.
Star names began to filter into the side as the decade rolled on, most notably Romário and Oleg Salenko, both stars of the 1994 World Cup. But neither of them would be around for the 1998-99 season when Valencia won their first trophy in 19 years. Valencia reached the final of the Intertoto Cup, but won the Copa del Rey, beating Atlético Madrid soundly 3-0 in Seville.
That in many ways showed the turning point for Valencia, from a trying team to one which marked itself out as a force to be reckoned with, and not just in Spanish football. The following decade would see Valencia win two LaLiga titles, a Spanish Supercup, another Copa del Rey, one UEFA Cup, and finish consecutive runners-up in the Champions League.
Towards the end of the 2000s, they began to slip away from the dizzying heights they had previously reached but were still competitive. Even the worrying 2007/08 season, when Valencia slipped into a relegation battle, provided joy. Voro, a former Valencia player and legend who remains at the club ready to step in when a manager has been dismissed, took charge of the team after Ronald Koeman was sacked. Guiding the team away from the drop zone and winning the Copa del Rey, it would be one of the last moments in the sun the club would have.
The 2008/09 season was one which began hopefully, a young Unai Emery was in the dugout and big things were expected. Plans were in place for a new stadium, literally called the Nou Mestalla, the outlook from the outside was sunny. Internally things were a disaster, a report in 2008 showed that the club was in €400 Million Euros of debt. Players were going unpaid and the wider financial crisis was hitting Spain hard.
Valencia naturally had to sell its biggest assets. Players such as David Villa, David Silva, Juan Mata, and Roberto Soldado were all sold to richer clubs in the preceding years. With no clear way to get out of their debt problems, this left the door open for Peter Lim to take over the club in 2014.
Peter Lim
Singaporean businessman Peter Lim should be a familiar name to those involved in football, and that’s a worry. Club owners are usually not household names unless some controversy surrounds them, which is very much the case with Lim. His business acumen can’t be sniffed at, but it has not translated favorably into running a football club.
Boosting Valencia back to where they had been in the early 2000s was always going to be hard, but that wasn’t the main task. What the club needed was a sensible plan to keep the club in the black, or at least avoid going further into the red. Sevilla proved that you could find success on a budget, so what happened under Lim?
The first thing Lim did was get his friends involved. Antonio Pizzi was sacked in 2014, and replaced by Nuno Espírito Santo. Although Nuno’s record at Rio Ave was good and did probably merit a shot at a bigger job, former Valencia Executive President, Amadeo Salvo revealed that Nuno’s appointment was a condition by Lim when purchasing the club. This was done likely as a favor to Lim’s friend and super agent, Jorge Mendes.
Nuno’s appointment could be described as nepotistic, but ultimately routed in footballing logic, his replacement upon being sacked in 2015 was bizarre. The man charged with turning Valencia’s 2015/16 season around was Gary Neville, who had zero managerial experience at the club level. He was joined by his brother, Phil, who between them had both been assistant managers for the England senior team and Under 21’s respectively. How much influence they had is questionable, especially Gary, who I have to admit I never realized even held the position until now.
They lasted 28 games in charge, the infamous 7-0 loss to Barcelona being the thing which they will be remembered for. As I said, the Nuno appointment was sensible to a degree. Appointing a manager with no experience, who couldn’t speak Spanish, and was very clearly done because he was mates with the owner is no way to run a club.
The rest of the managers Lim has appointed have not had an easy ride themselves. 2016 saw three managers, Pako Ayestarán and Cesare Prandelli both came and went, the latter resigning due to what he called false promises by the club. Only Voro on an interim basis could be guaranteed a parking space at the Mestalla.
Marcelino arrived in 2017 and did the best out of any manager in the Lim era. Under him, Valencia qualified twice consecutively for the Champions League and won the 2019 Copa del Rey. It would be a false dawn, as Marcelino and Sporting Director, Mateu Alemany, were both sacked the following season. According to Marcelino himself, in an interview with Spanish newspaper AS, he was sure that pushing to win the Copa del Rey was his downfall. He explains that he received messages to discount the cup competition, presumably to favor league form. He also said that he received no congratulations from Lim on the achievement, but did get thanks for European qualification.
How much truth lies in those claims is unknown, though it is telling that in 2022 when audio files were leaked by local paper Superdeporte, then Chairman Anil Murthy blamed the duo for players leaving the club. Murthy claims that the recordings are doctored, he resigned after the incident came to light, the club never denied the audio’s origins.
The summer of 2020 was one of the most humiliating for the club. Ferran Torres and Rodrigo both departed to the Premier League, and Geoffrey Kondogbia was sold to Atlético, but the two which hurt the most were the sales of Francis Coquelin and Dani Parejo to Villarreal. Parejo wasn’t Valencia born and bred, but he might as well have been. He was the club’s captain and a beacon of hope for a beleaguered fan base, so losing him to a rival club, one which historically wouldn’t have been able to touch Valencia, was a tough pill to swallow, to say the least.
A season of survival and a bleak future
So, under Peter Lim’s direction, the club has gone backward. It used to be a club that, although struggling financially, was still a dignified outfit. Now it is just plain struggling, the losses are still piling up off the pitch and increasing on it. At the time of writing Valencia are 19th in the table, having sacked Gennaro Gattuso for doing basically all he could with the tools at his disposal, which as we’ve seen is never enough for Lim.
Their main hopes for survival are goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili, captain José Gayà, and squeezing the last drops out of an injury-hit 36-year-old Edinson Cavani. It’s those three and hoping that the youthful exuberance of the rest of their squad somehow is enough to carry them over the survival line. At least that is how it appears to be under the management of Rubén Baraja, the poor fool should have avoided the job if he knew what was good for him.
Baraja was a player for Valencia between 2000-2010, being a fan favorite and a member of the great Valencia teams of the early 21st century. His previous managerial experience was in the Segunda Divison, with little success. I wish him all the luck in the world, but this appears to be an appointment to slake some anger from the fans. But at the same time, they were probably left with little in the way of options regardless.
Valencia’s best hope of getting rid of Lim is probably by succumbing to relegation, but it isn’t that simple. Relegation could likely force the businessman to sell up, but only to someone insane enough to take on the massive debt the club has with fewer revenue streams in a lower division. Not the mention the abandoned hulk of the Nou Mestalla, the ghost of a more hopeful time which had its construction work stopped in 2009, despite numerous promises that its completion was only “a few more years away”.
It’s not quite registered yet how big Valencia doing down would be. When I wrote something similar about Sevilla at the start of the season that felt big, however, Valencia going down would be more than just a big club dropping out of the top tier. It’s not far-fetched that it could be the end of the club, bankruptcy is sadly one of the possible fates being rumored if relegation is indeed what happens. More likely the club will be hit hard financially, having to sell it’s prize assets and begin the journey back. Thankfully, a club as big as Valencia should be able to find a new owner even if it goes into administration.
