Gary Neville’s Valencia nightmare: Could it be a career-defining mistake?

As Valencia’s team bus pulled out of the Benito Villamarin on Sunday night, a crowd of baying Valencia fans screamed angrily in its direction, upset at yet another defeat – this time against Real Betis. As manager Gary Neville watched their remonstrations impassively from his seat at the front of the bus the scene was captured by one photographer, an image that may yet turn out to be iconic in the account of Neville’s difficult time in Spain.

Back in December Neville had been appointed at Valencia to moderate fanfare, with British observers somewhat bemused by the sudden leap into management (and abroad, of all places), but Los Che fans were hopeful a man lauded in England for his incisive punditry would restore the club to Champions League contention, after predecessor Nuno Espirito Santo lost the dressing room and oversaw the club’s slide to the fringes of La Liga’s top ten.

Instead, things have only got worse under Neville – with the team yet to win in the league under the new boss, slipping to the fringes of the relegation battle after five draws in nine games.

"It's clear that we are better than some of the teams we are playing against," Neville insisted on Sunday. “We have to turn it round quickly, I understand that. It is hard to explain the defeat. It will turn."

Yet it seems the 40-year-old may already have lost the backing of the players, an ominous sign.

"That's not up to me,” striker Alvaro Negredo said when asked if Neville should be sacked, his evasion damning in its own way. “We know the coach well, but that's up to the club. We shouldn't get involved in things that we aren't supposed to."

Reports in Spain suggest that, while the Copa del Rey semi-final second leg with Barcelona in midweek may have a bearing on Neville’s status, it is the weekend league encounter with Espanyol that will seal Neville’s fate. Defeat, or indeed even anything less than victory, and he will be gone.

“I said before I came that I would be judged in five months,” Neville said. “The obituaries have already been written: I have been judged in six weeks."

In the short-term that will mean a return to Sky Sports, and a continuation of his coaching role with England. But in the longer term, will a man with clear ambitions in management find it easy to get another opportunity?

As almost everyone probably knows by now, Gary Neville’s route into the Valencia hotseat was a heartwarming tale of who-you-know and who-you-have-gone-into-business-with.

Neville’s relationship with Valencia’s owner, Peter Lim, goes back a number of years, with the two most recently combining on a number of UK-based ventures – most notably Salford City FC and (the much more expensive) Hotel Football adventure.

Lim therefore knows Neville well - trusting his judgement and is undoubtedly impressed (as most casual fans have been) with his knowledge and analysis of the game. Keen to protect one of his most valuable investments and appoint a new manager he feels comfortable with, Lim would understandably have seen Neville as a standout option when Valencia decided to change directions at the start of last December.

Neville, for his part, would have surely perceived working for Lim as a relatively safe way to make his first steps into management, an interim appointment to revive a falling giant that both parties could revisit in the summer.

There was also another factor in play; Neville’s predecessor, Nuno, was represented by Jorge Mendes – the super-agent who has worked closely with Lim to compile Valencia’s squad. There had been a sense that Mendes’ influence at the club had been too great (one persistently denied by the chairwoman, Lay Hoon Chan) and so, by going to Neville, Lim was perhaps wresting back a certain control over club affairs.

“If Mendes controlled the club, Nuno would not have left today,” Chan pointedly said after the former boss was dismissed. “This is all based on results and performances.

“I really do not believe that [the new coach] will be someone related to Mendes. I want to underline that the coach we bring in will be for his credentials and the qualities he can bring to the club."

Nevertheless, the politicking at the highest levels of the club should perhaps have been a warning to Neville – a first sign that a golden ticket into management was perhaps an offer that was actually too good to be true.

Barely six weeks on, now the criticism is that Neville is too close to Lim - and was appointed for his connections, not his qualities. It is perhaps instructive that the man now hotly tipped to replace Neville, former Spurs boss Juande Ramos, has no obvious links to either Mendes or Lim.

Neville may allow himself a wry smile at the knowledge that it is Negredo who has seemingly been first among the Valencia players to offer tacit approval to suggestions the manager should be sacked.

While the former Manchester City has scored a couple of important goals for Neville already, he has undoubtedly been guilty of a far greater number of glaring misses – wasted opportunities that have turned some otherwise authoritative performances into painful defeats.

In basic terms, it has been Negredo’s wasteful form in front of goal that has had the biggest bearing on Valencia’s poor results.

Neville has had other issues that all managers face – injuries, suspensions, an understandable lack of confidence throughout the squad – but he has also had difficulty getting to grips with both the personnel available to him and the particulars of Spanish football.

Rotation has been constant to the point of being distracting, while certain key players (captain Dani Parejo, for example) have found themselves pushed and pulled from prominence with remarkable haste.

This chopping and changing, coupled with the poor results and the initial perception of Neville, have combined to make the atmosphere around the club increasingly hostile.

As one local radio journalist told the Mirror: “Imagine you have a foreign manager, a friend of the owner, who comes in to your club, never wins even one game and just tells you that you don’t understand the good work that he’s doing ... that’s Gary Neville.”

Neville talks a good game, but results on the pitch undermine that. His only wins have come in the Copa del Rey – but so too has his biggest defeat, a 7-0 loss to Barcelona that finally seemed to turn the fans (who had previously been more angry at the ownership) against him.

“I expected the coach's resignation, as well as some apologies,” the ex-Valencia goalkeeper Santiago Canizares said after that game. “I may be ignorant, but I'm surprised he hasn't. I thought he was honest."

For Betis, their only home wins this season have now come against teams managed by Neville and David Moyes (when he was at Real Sociedad). Coincidence? Perhaps. But the struggles of both British managers suggest that what works in the Premier League does not necessarily work in Spain (where technique is undoubtedly better and, perhaps, tactical understanding is more nuanced), something both men have only learned too late.

That is not to say that everything comes down to Neville. Nuno’s prior struggles show that all was not well at the club even before the Englishman turned up at the Mestalla. Neville walked into a club with injuries to key players and a losing mentality that, much like an oil tanker, needed a fair amount of time to turn around.

"Is Neville to blame? Undoubtedly not," an editorial in Valencian newspaper Super Deporte argued. "He picked up a devastated team, hurt physically and psychologically."

The perception is that a club that spent more than £100m in the summer (recouping just £37m, most of it from Nicolas Otamendi’s sale to Manchester City) should be doing significantly better, should even be looking to improve upon last season’s fourth place finish.

But the pervading sense now is that Valencia’s transfer activity is not what it seems, that the big money moves for Rodrigo, Andre Gomes and Joao Cancelo (all from Benfica), Aymen Abdennour and Aderlan Santos were examples of Jorge Mendes moving around his assets rather than the club making the best available purchases to enhance a squad looking to move up a gear.

Lim’s ultimate aim might be to profit from Valencia, but the difference for Mendes is that is undoubtedly his immediate and primary focus – positive results for the club would merely be a happy side-effect. At the moment the opposite is happening, a consequence of putting together a transfer plan based on what will make agents the most profit rather than what the club needs.

That has surely caused rifts within the squad – long-serving players angered at seeing Mendes clients come in on vast wages, those clients then also perhaps demotivated as they know their future is securely tied to their representative – while the first poor results sent morale further through the floor. That perhaps partly explains why a squad that contains most of the same players that managed to finish fourth last term has plummeted this time around.

Neville has been generally praised for his work ethic throughout his time in Spain – the one area he has earned unqualified approval – but even all that application on the training ground has not been enough to patch together those cracks.

"That's the most difficult thing to explain,” Neville added. “I would say that it was a tight game, that the lines are fine, but that you have to win it in both boxes. I can't believe that we will keep missing chances and that every time there is a chance the other team will take it.

"There's no doubt that at times like this, everyone needs to stay together. Everyone suffers. It's just not going for us at the moment. That was a pretty solid away performance.

“I continue to work, I continue to have belief. Conversations with the owners are between me and the owners.”

Once happily sitting in the Sky Sports studios, dissecting the failures of others with clarity and, occasionally, withering putdowns, Neville has found life on the other side of the fence much harder to deal with. If he is dismissed – as seems increasingly likely – then he will surely return to that old role (Sky Sports have not really filled his spot, as they always seemed to retain hope he would be back next season anyway) but it may not be the same experience.

For starters, it is hard not to expect that perceptions of Neville will be affected by his failure in Valencia. Will the audience be so accepting of his seemingly-insightful analysis, or will they wonder if a man who failed so disastrously in his first management stint actually knows what he is on about?

What is certain, of course, is that any future subjects of Neville’s ire (whether it be "Playstation player" David Luiz, or Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger) will have a ready-made retort that the former full-back will have no real response for.

“Most of the time the reputation of big players gets you a big club early,” Wenger, whose transfer dealings had previously been called “naïve and arrogant” by Neville, said at that time. “When you are not a big name, you have first to battle.

Neville will find his reputation within management similarly diminished. Before all this there had surely been a realistic possibility that he would replace Roy Hodgson as England coach after the European Championships – the Football Association have made no suggestion they really want to extend Hodgson’s deal, and Neville would previously have been a popular (and justifiable) successor. Similarly, it is not outlandish to suggest a reasonably successful spell at Valencia could have even propelled him into the Manchester United job (perhaps alongside Ryan Giggs), although maybe Manchester City's Pep Guardiola capture made that less likely.

What is certain, however, is both those eventualities are now definitely out of the equation.

Instead Neville will likely return to England, in the summer if he is extremely lucky, needing to take his medicine and restart his career. Unless he knows a few more Peter Lims he will surely have to apply for posts outside the Premier League if he is to get a second chance, something that might require a certain swallowing of pride to do.

Only time will tell how willing Neville is to do that – you sense he might be willing to suck it up – but it may ultimately prove that his management style translates far more easily in English football.

It seems safe to assume that another hammering at the hands of Barcelona will mean Valencia will have to beat Espanyol for Neville to retain his job. Whether either eventuality – victory or dismissal – helps solve the underlying issues at the club remains to be seen.

For now, it appears the boardroom manoeuvres at Valencia will continue. Suso Garcia Pitarch, a man hardly lauded in his first stint in the role, has returned as sporting director – offering a new command of the situation but, perhaps more pertinently, placing another figure of blame between Lim and performances on the pitch.

By all accounts Pitarch has no final say on players or managers, making him essentially little more than an advisor – and Lim would seem to have enough of those on hand already. But the word on Pitarch is that he is already counselling against retaining Neville, and the rumours of Juande Ramos are surely not without foundation.

Valencia’s problems begin on the pitch, but they don’t end there. And until matters are sorted out at the top of the club, you wonder if any manager – let alone a novice – will truly be able to succeed.

But that won’t help Neville, who in the short-term has surely seen his managerial ambitions take a huge knock. What at first appeared a gilded path into management has turned into something very different.