Valencia's On-Field Struggles Are Now Exposing Off-Field Issues
Shirts were off, selfies were in full flow and a large contingent of travelling fans in Monaco were euphoric: Celebration time had arrived.
On the night, Valencia had lost in the principality, but it didn't matter. In the bigger picture, they'd won.
For Valencia, qualification for the Champions League group stage hadn't just been a goal, it had been an obligation. "Not getting into the Champions League would be a disaster," manager Nuno Espirito Santo had said to Radio Marca almost 12 months earlier, but even as impressive victories over the likes of Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid began to rack up, even as Valencia began to re-emerge as a Spanish power, Nuno's message had always been clear: We can't celebrate until it's done.
Well, now it was.
It might have felt that way back in May, when Paco Alcacer had scored the winning goal against Almeria on the final day of season to secure fourth place and a Champions League play-off berth. But this is a club, now out of financial turmoil and backed by the wealth of owner Peter Lim, that demands more than that; there was still one more step to take. And in August against Monaco, they took it, a 2-1 loss at the Stade Louis II being enough to secure a 4-3 aggregate win.
"Negredo takes Valencia into promised land," proclaimed Marca. The message from the club itself was shorter and sweeter: "Mission accomplished!"
Valencia were back where they belonged.
Two days later, Valencia weren't just in any Champions League group, they were in a very winnable Champions League group, drawn with Zenit St Petersburg, Lyon and Gent. Just 20 days after that, Zenit were in town.
This was it: Valencia were ready; the city was ready; Mestalla was ready.
Or at least, that was how it was meant to be.
For the club's biggest night in more than two years, after two years of "sadness, of no success," as Nuno had put it in an AS interview, after spending an entire season since Lim's takeover hellbent on reaching this very moment, just 28,000 turned up at Mestalla—half full for the night.
And Valencia lost.
Three days later, Nuno's men drew 0-0 at home with newly-promoted Real Betis, which was disappointing in itself. More disappointing was that Betis played the entire second half with 10 men. In the stands, whistles echoed. White handkerchiefs were waived. "Nuno go now," they chanted.
Next up came a 1-0 loss to Espanyol—the same Espanyol that was thrashed 6-0 by Real Madrid and that owns the worst defence in the league. Most recently came a 3-1 loss to Athletic Bilbao, who sat one spot out of the relegation zone.
Evidently, all isn't well at Mestalla. And the locals are growing restless.
Such discontent will strike many as alarmist so soon after a terrific 2014-15 season, but this isn't a situation in which tension exists simply because of on-field struggles in the early stages of the new campaign. No, instead, the on-field struggles have become the trigger for the discontent over off-field issues to be voiced.
Into the second season of Lim's reign, fans don't like the look of how the club is being run.
In the summer, hopes were high for a blockbuster few months, with Lim's financial wealth expected to see Valencia among Europe's top spenders in the transfer market. And they were, but just not in the way fans had imagined.
In total, Valencia spent almost £100 million (€135 million) on players in the summer, but most of that accounted for Alvaro Negredo, Rodrigo, Andre Gomes and Joao Cancelo—four players they already had but who had compulsory purchase deals after one-year loan spells.
As for additions, they came in the form of Zakaria Bakkali, Aymen Abdennour, Santi Mina, Mathew Ryan, Aderlan Santos and Danilo (more on him in a minute). As a collection, it was OK, but not at all what was expected. Worse still was that Nicolas Otamendi left.
Yet, that's only half of the story.
In July, president Amadeo Salvo departed. So, too, did sporting director Francisco Rufete and scout Roberto Fabian Ayala, both former players. The suspicion was that battle lines had been drawn. In came Lim's advisor Lay Hoon Chan to replace Salvo, which meant the club had completed its transition: The decision-makers were all Lim people—Lim himself, Nuno and Chan.
And one more, they suspected: Jorge Mendes.
Mendes, the renowned player agent, had helped bring his friend Lim to Valencia, just as he did with Nuno—Mendes' first client, who is still represented by his agency, Gestifute.
On its own, that mightn't be a problem, but to those outside the club, particularly the fans, Mendes looks like a quasi-sporting director with conflicted interests.
Gomes, Cancelo and Rodrigo were all brought to Mestalla last summer with Mendes' help, with many feeling the fees for the trio were inflated. This summer, the Portuguese agent also helped the club sign Mina, Bakkali and Danilo, the latter arriving via another one-year loan deal with a compulsory €15 million purchase deal, €14 million of which Valencian sports daily Superdeporte (h/t Dermot Corrigan of ESPN FC) claims will go straight to Mendes.
But it doesn't end there.
Mendes hasn't only brought people in; he's taken them away, too. He is, after all, the man who took Otamendi to Manchester City, overseeing the loss of Valencia's outstanding player of last season and personally benefitting from doing so.
What is he to Valencia, then? Is he the sporting director?
"Certainly not," insisted Chan in October. "Jorge Mendes is just a friend." Decisions on players, she said, were based on their "quality as a footballer and future potential, no other reason." It was a firm stance, but plenty are still sceptical. And it's not hard to see why.
"If Valencia had a Facebook status," wrote FourFourTwo's Tim Stannard brilliantly, "it would be 'it's really complicated.'"
The thing is, though, that much of this would be tolerated if Valencia were winning. But they're not. Worse, they don't look at all like last season's Valencia.
Last season, Nuno's outfit was one defined by intensity. At the raucous Mestalla, they regularly made blistering starts, overwhelming their opposition with speed, physicality. Urgency. Their method was an all-guns-blazing one, Nuno regularly speaking of his demand that his team attack, attack and attack some more. Never would Valencia just retain the ball for the sake of it.
The most memorable example came when Atletico Madrid came to town. By the 13th minute, Valencia were 3-0 up, Mestalla almost exploding, the most resilient side in all of Europe the previous season blown away in less than a quarter of an hour. Real Madrid got a battering, too. Barcelona only just escaped.
By season's end, Valencia had 70 goals and 77 points, the sort of numbers they hadn't reached since winning their last league title in 2003-04.
But now?
Now, seven games into the new league season, they have two wins and only four goals, which is the worst scoring start in the club's history. Currently in ninth, their position isn't yet disastrous, but it soon could be. To date, the fixture list has been gentle, or that's what it was supposed to be: Rayo Vallecano, Deportivo La Coruna, Sporting Gijon, Real Betis, Espanyol, Granada and Athletic Bilbao. Between now and the first week of January, they'll face Madrid, Atletico, Barcelona, Sevilla, Villarreal and Celta Vigo.
In this form, Valencia will need all the help they can get. But that's the problem; the support right now isn't what it was.
"The Mestalla always helps us," Nuno said recently, as he often has. "Last year, even before the team bus arrived at the stadium, we already had a psychological advantage because of our supporters." Maybe so, but that was last year; this is this year.
This year, a Mestalla was that was previously bullish beyond belief is now holding up banners to the tune of: "I'll be here, in the good times and the bad." Not exactly a psychological advantage, is it? The fans suddenly have little to cheer about.
In defence, the loss of Otamendi has been a colossal blow, Valencia dearly missing his crash-and-bang approach that was emblematic of the team's mentality last term. The absence of Diego Alves has also hurt, which, combined with the injury to Ryan, has forced third-choice goalkeeper Jaume Domenech into action. The results have been mixed at best.
Most troubling, though, is the way Nuno's side seems to have forgotten how to attack, or lost the instinct for it. Negredo and Alcacer can't buy goals, none are coming from the midfield as they did last season, and the whole machine feels predictable and kind of stale. The infectious verve and swagger have gone, or, as one local columnist put it, per Sid Lowe of the Guardian: "They're like my fridge in the summer, when nothing inside it is getting cold: not broken, exactly, but not really working."
The man who's got to make it work is Nuno.
With pressure mounting around him and the voices of discontent growing louder, the manager has insisted that unity is the way to recover: "If we stay together and united we will emerge from this situation," he said after the loss to Espanyol.
But even he must see that unity won't lead to winning. Instead, it's only winning that will lead to unity. For Nuno, whether rightly or wrongly, is perceived by sections of the fanbase as a beneficiary of a sort of Lim-Mendes alliance, his position strengthened by the departures of Salvo, Rufete and Ayala and the greater power now in the hands of three men who, in the eye of the public, represent the new Valencia.
"It's not Nuno's Valencia," the Portuguese told Marca during the summer when asked if he wants to become a household name. "Everyone is part of it." There are large numbers of fans, though, who don't want Nuno to be someone in that everyone, the manager being a lightning rod for the frustration, given that he's the one standing on the touchline.
So can he hold it all together? Can he unite the "Valencianistas" by winning, rather than winning by uniting them? That's all he can do to placate them; the circumstances exist for tension, for genuine heat, unless success is achieved.
At Valencia, as recently as August it was "mission complete." If they're not careful, they might soon have to start the whole mission again.
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