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Anger at Valencia as cracks appear in LOSER Peter Lim's project
- Thread starter Suarez
- Start date
Absolutely agree and I am with you on this.
It's only interesting if a Sinkie is involved and it's failing.
77 million euros on 3 players.............2 of them total unknowns...............last season also similar signings..............
still any doubt about his true purpose in buying Valencia ?
i knew it from the very start...........
still any doubt about his true purpose in buying Valencia ?
i knew it from the very start...........
Absolutely true
Valencia fans turn on Nuno after running out of people to blame
Valencia’s Algerian striker Sofiane Feghouli puts his head in his hands as his club struggle against Betis Photograph: Kai Foersterling/EPA
Monday 21 September 2015 11.08 EDT Last modified on Monday 21 September 2015 16.48 EDT
Right by the dressing room door at Mestalla, fixed on to the wall next to the stairs and passed by hundreds of fans at the end of every game, passed by the players and the manager too, is a suggestion box. Made from black metal with Buzón de sugerencias stuck on the front in white, and a tiny window at the bottom so you can see if there’s anything inside, it’s only small but there’s a little slot across the top and room enough for recommendations. Sign Cristiano Ronaldo, perhaps (and sign him, not just his image rights). Bring back Ian Cathro, maybe. Or how about: score goals and win games? And whatever you do, don’t tempt them.
“Them” are the Valencia supporters and even if he’d never peered inside, the club’s manager, Nuno Espirito Santo, surely knew that last one already. They are not the pantomime villains they are too often portrayed as, but Nuno knows that this is not always an easy club to manage and, just in case he had forgotten, on Saturday night he was handed an uncomfortable reminder. What the former Barcelona coach Johan Cruyff always called the “entorno” – that debilitating swirl of pressure, criticism and self-interest around the club – is certainly present here too and, to employ the unusual euphemism, Valencia’s fans are among the most “demanding” in Spain: loud, committed and not afraid to turn. Many a manager has been whistled at Mestalla. And plenty have been whistled out of there.
A man with presence and charisma, Nuno worked at making supporters participants last season, perhaps in part because he knew all that. He cultivated them, bringing them along as a new kind of enthusiasm swept over the club and they turned up at training to support the team, waited for the team bus outside the ground for home matches armed with fireworks, and welcomed them back again from away ones. Nuno put them at the heart of his discourse, game after game, and after the final match when Valencia reached the Champions League he said they had done it together. He was popular and a populist, but this weekend the populace turned.
“Mestalla against Nuno” ran the headline in the Valencian sports daily Super Deporte, handily drawing on estalla which also means “erupt”. Mestalla erupted, all right.
There were just a couple of minutes left and Valencia were drawing 0-0 with Real Betis. By the final whistle they had taken 22 shots but only five were on target and rarely did they genuinely look like finding a way through, even though Betis had been down to 10 men for over 40 minutes. Defeated 3-2 by Zenit St Petersburg in the Champions League three days earlier, a game for which only 28,000 turned up, Valencia were on course for a third consecutive home match without victory; four games into the season, they had won just once – late at Sporting Gijón – and scored only two goals.
Valencia’s fans had given a huge ovation to the Betis winger Joaquín as he left the field pointing at his heart, clapped off on his return to Mestalla where he played for five years. Now they voiced different emotions. It came from up the stands, where Alvaro Negredo was sitting, one of four starters against Zenit left out of the squad for this game, and it took the form of that classic symbol of discontent, the white hanky wave and the whistles. Then they started chanting “Nuno, véte ya!” – Nuno, go now!
Now, whistling does not necessarily mean that everything has broken down, or that fans cannot be won over once more. Even some chants do not mean that. Not in Spain and certainly not at Mestalla. There was something in Rodrigo’s words this weekend when he said: “If you don’t want to hear whistles, don’t go out on to the pitch.” But this wasn’t one or two of them and it did matter: soon, the chant felt almost unanimous, huge numbers joining in. And when the final whistle went, the manager who always made a point of leading his players into the centre of the pitch to applaud the fans headed straight down the tunnel to the dressing room. From there he went up the stairs and into the press room. Where, of course, he was asked about it.
“The question is normal and the response is obvious. The fans show their discontent and they express it towards the person responsible for the team and that’s me. If that is what the criticism is, I accept it and I assume that responsibility,” Nuno said. Then he added: “If it is for something else, I don’t know and I don’t care.”
And that’s the thing: it is for something else – at least in part. Calling for the manager’s head now, just four games into the season, is absurd – even Nuno’s biggest critics admitted that.
Nowhere to hide: Valencia’s Portuguese coach Nuno at the side of the pitch in the match against Betis Photograph: Jose Jordan/AFP/Getty Images
Valencia have not been beaten this season and have lost just once in 21 league games, against Barcelona back in April. Seventh place is not a disaster: ask Sevilla who are currently bottom and no one has turned on Unai Emery, certainly not like Valencia’s fans turned on him when he was there, taking them to third place three years in a row. Nuno had a point when he insisted: “There is no need to change, just strengthen what we’re doing,” as did the captain Dani Parejo when he explained it as a case of “the ball not wanting to go in”, insisting: “We’re playing better than our opponents: we have more of the ball, we’re putting in more crosses, we’re getting into the area more, we’re just struggling to finish off the moves.”
But there has been something unconvincing about Valencia, beyond the results. As one local columnist slightly oddly put it: “They’re like my fridge in the summer, when nothing inside it is getting cold: not broken, exactly, but not really working.” And even last season, Valencia’s coaching staff knew that the their position was precarious, all too aware that reaching the Champions League was not so much an objective as an obligation. This season, expectations were higher, the demands too, while the margins narrowed, but Valencia have not improved; not yet, anyway. However even that would not explain the change. No, this runs deeper.
It is not just that Valencia have not improved, it is that some fans suspected that would be the case; some were maybe even waiting for it. The conditions for complaint were already there. Nicolás Otamendi departed and Diego Alves is injured. The assistant coach, Ian Cathro, has gone, too – and there may genuinely be something in that. Meanwhile, Nuno’s relationship with some players has become a little tenser, his popularity waning. His assistant coach Phil Neville, incidentally, has proven very popular with players. Meanwhile, though Valencia officially spent more money than anyone else this summer, that figure is misleading: of their total €137m outlay, €74m was spent on buying players they had already brought in last summer on loan but with compulsory purchase deals.
So? So this was the second summer backed by Peter Lim’s financial muscle and fans wanted stars. They got three 19-year-olds: exciting players understandably presented as a sign that the club were building for the future but not the players some supporters demand, while two of them were represented by Jorge Mendes, Lim’s business partner. The same Mendes who took Otamendi to Manchester. Besides, that was not the only movement.
This summer, the president, Amadeo Salvo, left and so did the sporting director Francisco Rufete and his scout Roberto Fabián Ayala. It didn’t matter that Salvo was the president who had worked to make Lim’s arrival possible: the owner, not unjustifiably, wanted his own people in charge. Salvo was replaced as president by Lay Hoon Chan; no one replaced Rufete, all of which helped to underline that their roles had always been limited anyway, with real executive power concentrated largely in the hands of Lim and Mendes. For the first time, doubts were raised by the fans. Salvo, too, had worked hard to present a populist project for the club, making the fans participants. Rufete is a former player. Ayala is a club legend.
Those doubts surfaced again this weekend. Nuno, a former goalkeeper who was Mendes’s first client, has always been seen as Lim’s manager. When Valencia sacked Juan Antonio Pizzi, Salvo admitted that there was no point in keeping him on only for the incoming owner to sack him when the purchase went through a few months later and Nuno’s relationship with Rufete had not always been good. It may not have been fair, but the Portuguese was seen as the winner of what some called a summer “civil war”. Lim, Mendes and Nuno were the victors; importantly, the vanquished were popular. Some supporters cooled on the coach and there had been whistles already.
Eleven days ago, Mario Kempes, arguably the most important player in Valencia’s history and a man who has an ambassadorial role at the club, suggested that Nuno had accumulated too much power. “You can’t take a corner and head it in yourself: Nuno did well last season, when he was only the coach,” he said, adding that he didn’t like the departure of Salvo, Rufete and Ayala or businessmen – Mendes, in this case – getting involved in football clubs. His words, inevitably, had an impact, adding to the mix when Valencia drew 0-0 this weekend. As one newspaper put it halfway through August: “If the ball is on Valencia’s side, everything will be wonderful. But if not …”
The former Valencia goalkeeper Santi Canizares said there were three types of people calling for Nuno to go: those that blamed him for Salvo (and Rufete and Ayala) being pushed out; those who never really thought he was that good in the first place; and those that always want someone to blame. That someone has become Nuno; there’s no one else left.
“The fans show their discontent and they express it towards the person responsible for the team and that’s me,” Nuno said afterwards. It is more than just the team now; it is everything, whether it is his fault or not. Every doubt, every complaint, every suspicion, the missed chances and the missed signings. With Mendes not there, Lim in a private box and Nuno down on the touchline, visible and exposed, he becomes the target. The only one who actually can go now. Still, at least there is one, obvious way out of this: start scoring goals and winning games.
Well, it’s a suggestion.
Talking points
• It was all set up to be the day that Cristiano Ronaldo broke the record, or at least equalled it. Reporters were dispatched to the Bernabéu, calculators in hand, stats scribbled in notebooks – ahem – but it was not to be. Real Madrid did win this weekend, but Ronaldo did not score. Instead, Karim Benzema did. He got the only goal of a game in which Granada felt that they should have got more. Madrid’s goal had been offside; Granada’s “goal”, disallowed, had not. Afterwards Granada’s manager José Ramón Sandoval complained that Madrid had shown a lack of respect after their website invited supporters to bet on how many goals they would score. He might have had a point – and the chances are he showed it to his players – but for the fact that the website article is put up for every game, in one form or another, and run by one of their sponsors: a betting company.
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Whatever goes on in Valencia has nothing to do with S'pore. Why bother?
When there's positive news on Valencia and PL, some clones would glamorize it
http://www.sammyboy.com/showthread....sed-by-the-reception&highlight=Valencia+Peter
When there's positive news on Valencia and PL, some clones would glamorize it
http://www.sammyboy.com/showthread....sed-by-the-reception&highlight=Valencia+Peter
Even if Valencia winning the CL, would Peter donate another 10m $ towards sports here?
Better chance if history is repeated - letting Kim go again for drug consumption.
Champions League or bust for Valencia's faltering project
Nov 28, 2015 08:30:00
Coach Nuno is under pressure after his side's inconsistent start to the season, with a top-four finish vital to the club's future
By Ben Hayward
The voices of discontent are getting louder. Back-to-back defeats in the Champions League have left Valencia's progress in the competition hanging in the balance, while the club's form in La Liga has also been anything but convincing and there are few signs of a turnaround.
The Mestalla outfit looked to be cruising to the quarter-finals on their return to the Champions League, but losses away to Gent and Zenit have left Nuno's men needing to beat Lyon in their final group game and hope that the Belgians cannot claim more than a point at home to the Russian side (already confirmed as runaway winners of the sector).
Failure to qualify for the last 16 would be a big blow to Nuno, who is no longer wanted by the majority of the club's fans and is also unpopular among many of the players for his treatment of striker Alvaro Negredo.
The former Spain striker has completed 90 minutes just twice this term, scoring only two goals in his nine appearances. However, many members of Valencia's squad are unhappy at his treatment and could not understand how he was cut from the final squad in Gent after he had failed to make the list at all for the game against Malaga in La Liga.
The recent 5-1 win at Celta Vigo won the coach some credit, but Valencia were extremely disappointing again as they were held to a 1-1 draw at home to Las Palmas last weekend and the defeat at Zenit has left Nuno in a precarious position.
"It wasn't the image, it wasn't the performance and it wasn't the intensity we showed against Celta, the Portuguese coach said of the draw against Las Palmas. "It's difficult to find an explanation."
Owner Peter Lim will want one, however. The Singaporean businessman has invested almost €200 million in signings since taking over at Valencia, but will be concerned at the team's poor progress in recent weeks - and especially the dreadful display at Gent that has left their Champions League hopes in the balance.
Lim is expected to return to the executive box at Mestalla for the Liga clash against Barcelona early next month and the crucial Champions League clash versus Lyon.
"We will play a final against Lyon," Nuno said after the defeat in Russia. "I believe we won't fail at Mestalla."
The problem is that they will also depend on the result in the other game. With all their spending over the past two years, Valencia's project is very much dependent on Champions League football and what looked like a certain place in the second round is no longer a guarantee.
Nor is qualification for next season's competition. Currently in seventh spot in La Liga and still worryingly inconsistent, Los Che travel to direct rivals Sevilla on Sunday and then face Barca, Villarreal and Real Madrid in the weeks ahead along with the vital game against Lyon.
Five weeks that will establish the future of this expensive project - and also the future of Nuno on the Mestalla bench.
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i wonder what keeps a football club alive?the fans or a rich man's kindness and generosity and naivety in involving himself in the world of sports fucktards who only know how to blabber about their soccer or basketball and nonsensical things all day long and knows not a single lick about business and finance.if theres no billionaires like ambrovich to dump 1,800,000,000 US dollars into football clubs to keep u retards entertained.the day the ambrovichs and peter lims of the world walk out of the stadium is the day the world of sports entertainment collapses.every single one of these retarded clubs would be bankrupt.
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cronyism???lmao if u dont want cronyism to happen in ur football clubs u should make every single club go public,so i can short the shit out of man u and real madrid and leicester and valencia and every fucktard club out in the world until they go bankrupt.football clubs are giant sinkholes where tens of millions of debt get written off every year cause it will never get paid off,its like having thousands of mini greeces in the world.tell the sport fans to donate 50 million every year to their football clubs every year if they dont want cronysim,otherwise they should shut the fuck up and sit down.
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