Pete Jenson: Valencia were third in the all-time LaLiga table not long ago – what’s happened?

‘Lim go home’ is what it says on all the banners and placards held aloft at every Valencia home game. The comic irony is that Lim is home. 

Peter Lim is in Singapore, not in Valencia where the proud club he owns totters from one crisis season to the next and is now on the brink of a relegation battle. This Saturday another huge protest is planned. 

The team is due to kick-off its home game with Athletic Bilbao at 9pm local time. At 8pm, thousands of disgruntled fans will assemble outside the ground and make their voices of dissent heard. 

They plan not to actually go inside the Mestalla stadium until the 19th minute of the game – 19 is a symbolic number for the club founded in 1919.

Despite slipping into the bottom three on Friday night after Cadiz beat Girona, Valencia’s average home gate this season is a healthy 40,000. 

‘Lim go home’ is what it says on all the banners and placards held at every Valencia home game

The irony is that the deeply unpopular owner Lim (right) is back at home in Singapore, not in Valencia where the proud club he owns is in crisis and is now on the brink of a relegation battle

Valencia slipped into the LaLiga relegation zone after Cadiz beat Girona on Friday night

The protesters hope there will be 40,000 outside Mestalla at 9pm making a clear statement to a sizeable national and global television audience what they think of their owner.

As always with clubs in turmoil, there is division and some fans will be inside from the start of the game – not because they don’t also want Lim to sell-up, but because they feel this is the time to back the side from the first whistle, in view of the precarious league position.

Even if there are 40,000 protesting Valencia fans outside Mestalla at kick-off on Saturday, and even if that scenario repeats for the rest of the season at every home game, Lim is not going to sell.

There was a similar protest at the end of last season when around 5,000 gathered outside Mestalla for Valencia’s last game leaving just 16,000 inside the famous old concrete arena. 

One banner read: ‘We will get you out of our club’. Lim shrewdly picked the charismatic, dynamic Gennaro Gattuso as the team’s new coach in June and the discontent subsided.

The Italian made a positive start but, having reached the Spanish Cup final last season, Valencia were part of the four-team Spanish Super Cup played in Saudi Arabia in January. This meant they had to play 10 games in 35 days and the squad couldn’t cope. 

With league form faltering, they then went out of this year’s Spanish Cup and the players had to wait several hours before they could leave the stadium after the game because an angry mob was waiting the exit to confront them through the windows of their cars.

Gattuso wanted new players in the winter market to help him arrest the slump but the club denied him this and so he became the tenth manager to depart in Lim’s nine years in charge. And for the eighth time in the club’s history Salvador Gonzalez, known as ‘Voro’, became caretaker coach. 

The famous club are struggling on the pitch and lie just one point above the relegation zone

Gennaro Gattuso left the club in January, the 10th manager to exit in Lim’s nine years in charge

Remarkably, in his previous stints, he has the third best win ratio of all the Valencia managers under Lim. But he started with a defeat against Real Madrid and a loss against Girona so there has been no let-up in the slide towards relegation.

Could it really happen? Voro was a young centre-back in the team the last time it did. It was 1986 and Valencia went down third from bottom, coming back up the following season. The squad is peppered with good players. 

There is the established quality of Spain international left-back Jose Gaya and veteran Uruguayan striker Edinson Cavani. And there are young talents too. 

In midfield Yunus Musah was signed aged 16 from Arsenal’s Under-18s in 2019 and is developing impressively.

In goal they have the 22-year-old Giorgi Mamardashvili, signed from Dinamo Tbilisi at the start of last season. They paid a million euros (around £890,000) for him and he has been one of LaLiga’s best keepers this season. 

For the eighth time in the club’s history Salvador Gonzalez, known as ‘Voro’, is caretaker coach

Successful former manager Marcelino told Sportsmail it is credible that he was sacked for trying to win the Spanish Cup rather than prioritise lucrative Champions League qualification

These are the products of shrewd recruitment and ought to make the club sizeable profits when eventually sold but that is part of the problem.

As Gary Neville became increasingly aware of during his 28 games in charge in 2016, the supporters feel that they should be much more than just a selling club cashing in to stay afloat. Their history backs them up. 

In 2016 they were third in Spain’s all-time historic league table until Atletico Madrid overtook them. They have won the league six times, including twice this century. 

They have a cup-winners cup and a UEFA Cup, as well as two Champions League final appearances.

Competing in Europe’s top club tournament feels like a distant dream now. Marcelino was the last coach to qualify them for it in 2019 when he also guided them to the Spanish Cup, their last trophy. He was sacked at the end of that season.

The theory abounding at the time was that success had been his undoing because the club didn’t like the way he went all out for the Spanish Cup, potentially endangering qualification via a top-four finish for the lucrative Champions League. In an interview last year, he told Sportsmail that the theory was credible.

As Gary Neville became increasingly aware of during his 28 games in charge in 2016, the supporters feel that they should be much more than just a selling club cashing in to stay afloat

Supporters have called on pundit Neville to campaign for Lim to leave the Spanish giants

Firing such a successful manager appeared at best daft, and at worst arrogant, based on the belief that such good coaches were easy to find. Lim may have had good reasons but it’s hard to tell because he rarely gives interviews.

Lim is in Singapore and his envoys to the city on Spain’s east coast have never worked their way into supporters’ hearts. Incumbent president, Layhoon Chan, is in her second spell in the post. 

A financial consultant who Lim trusts to run things, she has the task not just of managing the club but overseeing the eternal project to move to a new Mestalla and sell the current ground.

The move was bound by an agreement signed many years ago in which the club could sell the land on which the current stadium stood for development, providing it met certain requirements such as build a new sports complex in the city and complete the new stadium.

Those requirements have not been met and the agreement is now out-of-date. As things stand, the Mestalla land can now only be used for sport and recreation. 

On Saturday, a huge fan protest is planned which could see 40,000 outside Mestalla Stadium

For it to be sold for commercial development a new agreement needs to be made with the local authorities with the relevant requisites – finishing the new ground first among them.

Negotiations have been slow. The club wants to be able to commercially develop both land around the new Mestalla and obtain permission to build where the existing ground sits.

The local authority want guarantees the new stadium will be built and it wants the club to pay around 9.8m euros (£8.7m) – the cost of construction of a nearby sports center.

Once the football club signs a new agreement with the local authority Valencia CF will be worth much more than it is now. Understandably Lim is not about to sell up before that happens. The club’s supporters are stuck with him and he with them. 

What no one wants is for the team to be playing in Spain’s second tier next season. And that is something that cannot be remedied in City Hall – it will have to happen on the pitch, starting Saturday against Athletic Bilbao, with or without 40,000 supporters from the first whistle inside the stadium.