‘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…