The players sensed the coming crisis last summer. When Valencia returned to preseason training, many of its members did so with one thought on their minds: Get out, as soon as possible.
Some grumbled among themselves, going through the motions on the field as they waited for the calls from their agents that escape routes had been found. Others were more proactive. Half a dozen or so approached Pako Ayestarán, the third manager they had played for in a year, to ask to be allowed to leave.
What concerned Ayestarán was not that the players wanted to go but that they did not seem to mind where they went. Some, like Shkodran Mustafi, craved bigger, better things: He went on to sign with Arsenal , an English Premier League team. Others were less choosy; they just wanted out.
Ayestarán, picking up on the mood, passed the message on through the club’s hierarchy. His superiors maintained that only rats want to leave a ship in distress. In hindsight, with Valencia drifting toward relegation and possibly ruin, it looks increasingly as if those players, scrambling for safety, saw the iceberg coming.
To many observers, there is no tougher job in world soccer than coaching Valencia, even in the best of times. The club’s crumbling, iconic Mestalla Stadium is a place where the manager’s task has long been to deliver champagne success on a lemonade budget, where the directors are impatient and the fans implacable. For decades, it has been a draining trial for even the most decorated coaches.
Many of the managers on the club’s illustrious list of recent alumni — Claudio Ranieri, Rafael Benítez, Ronald Koeman and Quique Sánchez Flores, to name a few — privately recall their time at the club, historically Spain’s third largest, as the most arduous of their careers. They describe a toxic blend of internecine politics, financial strife and supporter unrest that made everything that followed seem blissfully straightforward in comparison.
The managers who decide that the scale and fame of the club are worth the risk do so with their eyes open. Cesare Prandelli, the most recent permanent occupant of the post, called Ranieri, a fellow Italian, before accepting the job. Ranieri counseled him to take it but reminded him that Valencia was a “great challenge.” Prandelli took it as an invitation, not a warning. He lasted 10 games.
Valencia is no stranger to chaos; to some extent, that is its natural resting state. But while it has been in crisis before, it has never experienced a crisis quite as deep as its current one, never endured something that feels so urgent, so perilous.
“There have always been tensions at Valencia,” said Jesús García Pitarch, the club’s sporting director until this month. “But previously those tensions have always been compatible with success on the field.”
Not, it is safe to say, anymore. Valencia, which has the fourth-highest budget in Spain’s top division, known as La Liga, is fourth from the bottom in the standings, having gone through four managers in less than two seasons. Relegation is a genuine possibility. Some of the club’s hard-core fans, its ultras, have taken out their frustration on the players, accusing them of lacking the requisite commitment and desire. To others, though, the blame lies much higher up.
“The players are victims more than perpetrators,” García Pitarch said. “Valencia does not have a focal point: There is no owner, no president, no long-term coach, no sporting director who they can look to as a reference. There has been a breakdown between the club, the players and the fans. The problem is in the structure.”
At the head of that structure is Peter Lim, the Singaporean entrepreneur who bought Valencia in 2014. At the time, his arrival seemed a blessing: a wealthy owner who could bankroll the club back to where it feels it belongs, challenging the triumvirate of Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid and Barcelona for Spanish supremacy.
The early signs were promising. Lim turned to Jorge Mendes, the most powerful agent in soccer, for assistance. A slew of players, including the gifted Portuguese midfielder André Gomes, arrived, and so did a coach, Nuno Espírito Santo. Valencia returned to the Champions League and seemed to be going places.
What has happened since shows this was an illusion. Espírito Santo was fired a few months into his second season and was replaced by Gary Neville, a former Manchester United defender and a business associate of Lim’s. Neville did not finish the season.
Ayestarán, previously Neville’s assistant, replaced him. When Ayestarán was fired after opening the season with four straight defeats , in came Prandelli, who did not make it to New Year’s Eve. Salvador González, a longtime servant of the club known as Voro, is now in charge until the end of the season — theoretically, at least.
That rapid turnover is part of the problem. Mustafi said in an interview last week that “changing the manager every 12 months creates doubts.” One of the most appealing things about signing with Arsenal, he said, was that he could be sure who the manager would be.
Continuity on the sideline is not the only problem at Valencia. Layhoon Chan, Lim’s appointed president, has criticized players publicly, breaking what García Pitarch sees as a crucial public bond among club, players and fans.
“The lack of support has demoralized the players,” García Pitarch said. “They do not feel protected, and they feel separated from the club.”
There is stasis at the executive level, too: Lim has not set foot in Valencia for a year, leaving a power vacuum.
“It is impossible to deal with all the small problems that appear every day,” García Pitarch said. “And in football, small problems can become big ones if you do not deal with them.”
Six hundred miles northwest, on Spain’s Atlantic coast, observers may be tempted to point out another factor. To followers of another fallen Spanish champion, Deportivo La Coruña, what is happening at Valencia is eerily familiar, and the common ingredient is not Lim but Mendes.
Long before he represented the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho, Mendes was an ambitious agent with one client: Espírito Santo, a little-known journeyman goalkeeper. Mendes arranged for his transfer to Deportivo through the club’s president, Augusto César Lendoiro. It was the first deal Mendes, then a nightclub owner, ever did.
“From then on, Mendes always felt he owed Lendoiro a debt of gratitude,” said Juan Yordi, a journalist who covers Deportivo for the Spanish newspaper Marca. The relationship is so close that Lendoiro calls Mendes his godson.
In 2012, with Deportivo in severe financial trouble, Mendes helped Lendoiro acquire, mostly on loan, a number of his many clients at favorable rates: not the superstars but the more unremarkable likes of Silvio, Roderick Miranda and Nélson Oliveira.
