#360view: Lim’s negligence has Valencia in a downward spiral

Andy West 08:40 15/09/2016
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  • Missing: Valencia owner Peter Lim.

    The season is still young, but one of the most surprising sights of the new European football campaign is once-mighty Valencia sitting rock bottom of La Liga with zero points from three games.

    And when you also take into account the less-than-mighty stature of Los Che’s opponents – Las Palmas, Eibar and Real Betis – their predicament looks even worse.

    This week, reports have predictably been claiming manager Pako Ayestaran has one more chance to rescue his job: if Valencia lose at Athletic Bilbao on Sunday, which would hardly count as a surprise, he could be fired.

    Ayestaran has only been in the job for less than six months, succeeding Gary Neville at the end of March, initially as caretaker and then on a permanent basis. Despite enjoying an initial uplift in results when Neville departed, Ayestaran has never looked particularly comfortable or convincing in his role, and perhaps the writing was on the wall at the end of last season when Valencia finished a tumultuous campaign on a fitting note with three consecutive defeats.

    He is the Mestalla’s seventh coach in just four years, with the stability of Unai Emery’s four seasons in charge making way for a revolving door approach which has only succeeded in taking Spain’s third-most supported club backwards.

    At the same time there has been similar turbulence in the playing squad, and the summer departure of stars like Paco Alcacer, Andre Gomes and Shkodran Mustafi was just the continuation of Valencia’s long-standing inability to keep hold of their players.

    It’s blindingly obvious that instability has been the chief cause of Valencia’s ongoing plummet, and the man chiefly responsible for failing to steady the ship is club owner Peter Lim.

    The Singaporean businessman was hailed a hero when he arrived nearly two years ago, happily going along with the notion that he was a knight in shining armour, riding in to rescue the club from the perils of poverty and spark a new era of glory.

    But since those optimistic early beginnings Lim has done pretty much everything wrong; starting by allowing pernicious uber-agent Jorge Mendes to effectively become the club’s director of football, enriching himself at the club’s expense by buying and selling players in his stable with wanton abandon.

    Lim belatedly realised that an agent, especially one like Mendes, is not the best person to run a football club’s recruitment policy, and distanced himself from Mendes by sacking unpopular manager Nuno, who had been appointed at the agent’s recommendation.

    But Lim’s next major error was appointing an enormously experimental replacement in the form of Neville, whose disastrous 28-game reign was hardly surprising considering his inability to communicate with his players due to the obvious language barrier.

    Perhaps Lim’s biggest error, though, has been his failure to show Valencia fans that he cares. He almost never attends games, preferring instead to demonstrate far more public commitment to Salford City, a non-league team he owns in England, and neither does he bother to explain himself in the local media.

    What on earth are Peter Lim’s intentions with Valencia? That question is being asked with increasing regularity by the club’s bewildered fans. So far, there have been no answers, and until the absent owner starts taking responsibility for the mess he has helped to create, the only way is down.

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