“I’m going to speak slowly, so I hope you can understand me,” Cesare Prandelli said and they understood him, all right. Valencia’s manager addressed them in Italian as usual and there was no translation. Not yet, anyway. That was usual too; there never is. He called the shirt a maglia, not a camiseta, and the promise to go slow didn’t last long, but he tugged at his top as he did so and they knew what he was saying, more or less: something about sweating for it, fighting for it, loving it. And if not, “fuori!”. Which was close enough to “Fuera!” for everyone to get it and, just in case, he gestured towards the door. “Fuori! Fuori! Fuori!”. Out! Out! Out!

It was Friday at Paterna, the club’s training ground, and the usual pre-match press conference was replaced by a prepared speech. Not that they had anticipated it. “Scusa, Manolo,” Prandelli said to the press officer, and then he began, pace quickening as he went on, the accusations ever more pointed until, after a minute and 57 seconds, message received and mostly understood, he stopped, said thanks, got up and walked out. There were lots of questions but, he said, “there are no questions, not today”. His words were enough and, for the first time since he took over at the start of October, they were going to get turned into Spanish too. As Prandelli left, his assistant coach Marco Fumagalli sat in his seat: “The míster said …”

The míster said he was “angry”, that he wanted to see a team “with character, willing to fight for the shirt”, players who would make sacrifices, “suffer” for it. “Whoever isn’t prepared to do that, out!” he said. “Whoever doesn’t have the character and the personality, whoever doesn’t love this shirt, out! Fuori! Fuor … i!” He admitted that what he was saying was “a serious accusation,” but it was one that must be made – he’d had to go looking for players to start training – and he’d already told them to their faces and not just on Friday. He’d told them the very first day that if they weren’t happy they could go. Now he told everyone; now he went public: “This isn’t about 4-4-2, 4-3-3, a diamond, who plays, who doesn’t,” he insisted, “it’s problem of attitude, seriousness and professionalism.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cesare Prandelli, left, dodges the ball during his side’s defeat at Real Sociedad. Photograph: Juan Herrero/EPA

The message contained hidden meaning too but on the surface it could hardly have been clearer and it was welcomed – outside the dressing room, at least. Many thought it about time the players were exposed, not protected, and other managers would have recognised his diagnosis. After one surprisingly good Europa League game last season Gary Neville announced that he needed the same on Sunday but knew he wouldn’t get it. A poll in Super Deporte gave Prandelli an approval rating of Kim Jong-un-ian proportions, 98% saying it was the right thing to do, while its headline the next day ran with “Ave, Cesare, we’re with you”. He had said what needed saying and it might even work. As he left Paterna, the paper claimed that he wound down his window and told them he was sure Valencia would win on Saturday.

They didn’t. The match against Real Sociedad on Saturday afternoon was just two minutes in when Valencia conceded the first goal, their defending dreadful as ever; it hadn’t reached the half hour when they conceded the second; and by the end, they had let in three. They had scored two themselves, and the manager declared himself satisfied with the attitude this time, but they hadn’t really been in it. A Dani Parejo penalty had made it 2-1 out of nowhere and Zakaria Bakkali’s goal came in the last minute, the game lost like so many others: you have to go back eight matches for Valencia’s last league win, 20 for their last clean sheet.

A month ago, the midfielder Enzo Pérez said that Valencia had “hit rock bottom”, but they found a way to dig even deeper and keep on losing. The club with the fourth biggest budget in primera are fourth bottom and falling. They’ve never been worse off 15 weeks into the season before, not even when they were last relegated, having collected just 12 points from a possible 45. Continue at this rate and another relegation will become a reality, 30 years later. With next week’s game against Real Madrid postponed because of the Club World Cup, there’s a chance they’ll finish 2016 in the bottom three. If Granada and Osasuna – two wins between them all season – weren’t so bad, they’d already be there; if Sporting had picked up a point this weekend, they would be too.

“We have to bring out our pride and our bollocks, or we’re going to shit,” Santi Mina said afterwards. As for their manager, he was going to Singapore – a short, simple sentence that says so much.

When the team arrived at Manises airport on Saturday night a small group of supporters were waiting for them, chanting for “more bollocks”. Others warned: “We’re heading to the second division.” TV cameras caught a man leaning out of his car window, shouting: “My kids are crying because of you!” From there they went to Paterna where, amidst the smoke bombs, they were greeted by 50 or so members of the Ultras Yomus. As the bus approached, so did they, thumping the front of it. Footage from inside captures someone saying: “Run those retards over.” Prandelli’s message was embraced: “Mercenaries! Sons of bitches! Shameless bastards!” ran the chants. “You don’t deserve to wear the shirt!” Players admitted that they were scared; it took a couple of hours and the police for them to finally head home.

Prandelli escaped the abuse but his return home was only brief; seven hours after landing at Manises he was back there again, with the sporting director Suso García Pitarch and the president Layhoon Chan were back there, cat

ching an east-bound flight to see the club’s owner, Peter Lim. Well, if the owner can’t go to Valencia – and he hasn’t been there all season – Valencia will go to the owner. Just as Prandelli went there, via Germany, to meet him before getting the job – a journey so long that he took over a game later than he could have done. Now he was going back; he said he had to.

At the end of Saturday’s match, Prandelli insisted it was time to “reflect deeply” on the situation and time to meet with Lim. On Monday, he did. On Sunday, the team trained without him. When they got there, a fan was waiting with a homemade banner with two eggs taped to it. Eggs, you see, is slang for balls – and taping his own gonads to the banner might have been a step too far. They might not have stuck, either.

There is much to talk about and much to reflect upon, well beyond the players. Prandelli knows that. He was right to talk about attitude, but the message was not just aimed at them. Nor was it about self-preservation, although point-the-finger-at-the-players is the oldest, most populist trick in the managerial handbook, and he has not been entirely blameless himself. Nor, even, was it only designed to encourage the club into making signings this winter and shipping out the players that he does not want – although that is his most pressing concern, with a striker and a midfielder desperately needed, and is likely to be the crux of the Singapore meeting. No. There is something deeper; players are underperforming, attitudes are questionable, the apparent psychological weakness a theme to which the manager has returned often, even before this weekend, and divisions a reality, but that does not happen in a vacuum. What of the structure, the club, culture that foments that, creating the conditions for failure?

This is a club that was unable to sell the players they wanted to and lost the players they said they didn’t (and there is a warning to Prandelli there: wanting to get rid of those who don’t love the shirt is not the same as being able to get rid of players who don’t love the shirt); a club that did not have the money to sign who they wanted, despite selling €100m worth of players – their best players. A culture in which the owner is absent, power resides somewhere else, and those who are present daren’t make decisions; in which suspicion shrouds everything and players feel like they’re passing through; where, just as importantly, they’re pretty sure the managers are too and where everybody else thinks that; where there have been three different sporting directors but where instead of real change or innovation there is inertia.

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“This is not a problem of the last two months; this is a problem of the last two years,” Prandelli said. The timings he chose were not coincidence. Two years, not two months: in other words, it is not a problem since he arrived, but since Lim did. It was a bold, challenging statement. In that context, the trip to Singapore feels almost like an ultimatum, and maybe not the manager this time. Another change of coach would not go down well and nor would it be a guarantee of anything.

Among the new owner’s first decisions – before he was officially the new owner at all, in fact – was to replace Juan Antonio Pizzi as coach and put Nuno Espírito Santo in charge. Nuno took them to the Champions League, but he was sacked early in the second season. Gary Neville took over from him, a friend and business partner of Lim’s presented as if he, a manager with no experience at all, was doing Valencia, one of the biggest clubs in Europe, a favour. Neville was sacked too, and replaced by his assistant coach Pako Ayesteran, who was sacked early this season. Suso García Pitarch, the third sporting director of the Lim era, publicly said that Ayesteran would have been sacked sooner too, but the league’s financial controls mean that there was no money to get anyone else.

When eventually, they did, things did not improve. Instead, they went backwards again. Things have got steadily worse with every coach – Valencia becoming the old lady who swallowed a fly. Nuno picked up 49% of the points, Neville picked up 29% of the points, Ayesteran picked up 27%, and so far Prandelli has picked up 25%. Only Salvador González “Voro” has been a success, and he was the caretaker – the best coach in their history and the man who said he hoped never to have to coach Valencia ever again, for one reason above all: because he loves the shirt.

Results and talking points

• Him again. Real Madrid 3–2 Deportivo, minute 92. A corner. You know the rest.



• Now that’s a substitution. Vicente Iborra came on for Sevilla after 46 minutes and went off again 45 minutes later, carrying the match ball under his arm, having got a hat-trick against Celta in Vigo that keeps them in touch with Barcelona, just a point behind in third place. He wasn’t letting go, either. As Sevilla’s players celebrated with a team picture from the dressing room, everyone is grinning and waving their arms around. Well, almost everyone. Iborra is clinging on, determinedly.

• 586 minutes later, Espanyol finally let in a goal when Duje Cop was Good Cop again, scoring for Sporting in the 92nd minute. Which was a pity for the home side but it didn’t matter much: they had already broken a club record and they had already scored twice themselves to extend their unbeaten run … and next up it’s Barcelona in the city derby. “The fans have a right to dream,” Quique Sánchez Flores said.

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• Atlético Madrid, who play Villarreal on Monday night, are moving to A Stadium Called Wanda. No, really. Oh, and they also changed their badges, simplifying it, which apparently make it more suited to the 21st century. So said some marketing guff or other.

• Joaquín Caparrós had a good explanation as to why his Osasuna team were beaten 3-0 by Barcelona. “the thing is, they’re very good,” he said. And they were too.

• Betis beat Athletic 1-0 with just one shot on target, but things are definitely getting better under Víctor. “If we could keep the ball a bit more, we’d be a team that enjoys this,” Joaquín said, in between cracking jokes.

Results: Málaga 1–1 Granada, Osasuna 0–3 Barcelona, Real Sociedad 3–2 Valencia, Las Palmas 1-1 Leganés, Madrid 3–2 Deportivo, Eibar 0-0 Alavés, Celta 0–3 Sevilla, Espanyol 2–1 Sporting, Betis 1–0 Athletic. Monday night: Villareal-Atlético