Valencia fans have recently expressed outrage at a number of management decisions.
You can read more about it here.
One of the reasons for the unhappiness: the sales of Francis Coquelin, captain Dani Parejo, and an earlier sale of Ferran Torres.
On August 14, 2020, the club's President, Anil Murthy released a statement addressing some of that unhappiness, on the club's website.
The letter starts with a quote attributed to Peter Lim.
The letter addresses the three sales previously mentioned in the article.
"In this situation, we will do everything possible to keep the club going. First of all, we must bring down salaries, which means selling players with 2-years or less remaining on their contracts, with high wages.
Furthermore, some are getting older and are prone to injury. We can’t keep these players, and neither should we.
Secondly, we must keep investing in our VCF Academy talents and bring them through. We have made significant changes to the VCF Academy and the medical team just two weeks ago."
The issue of players getting older, with their contracts coming to an end, was probably mentioned in reference to Coquelin, 29, and Parejo, 31.
Their injury troubles don't seem too excessive though, according to transfermarkt.com.
Here are Coquelin's past injuries since 2018:
Parejo has been a veritable ironman over the years.
Murthy's letter also contained a more pointed rebuttal over criticisms of Torres' departure.
"In the specific case of Ferran Torres, we should be clear: He chose to leave, despite being offered one of the best salaries on the team. His agent said NO to the offer. Each person chooses their own path to take. We will learn from this experience, but we won’t forget it. We have a good group of players from the VCF Academy coming up and we will make sure that we don’t have this kind of problem again. They are good kids. Many of them are training with the first team now."
Torres has spoken up about his departure in an interview with Marca earlier this month.
Torres told the Spanish sport newspaper that he had wanted to stay at Valencia, but gave a rather succinct breakdown on what went wrong, after outlining his three expectations for a renewal of his contract.
"One was for Peter Lim to be involved so that I knew I was important, another was to be captain as I had seen other clubs do, [Atletico Madrid] with Fernando Torres, for example, and the third was to be one of the highest paid players. I wanted two of the three, but none were fulfilled."
The statement by Murthy also touched on the poor financial condition of the club prior to the takeover, and sought to put the club's performance over the Peter Lim years into context.
"Once bitten twice shy. Once again, the debt kept rising in 2013, and the club were again unable to pay it. They haven’t paid since 2009. The entity that was then Bancaja, and which is now Bankia, forced the sale. They wanted new investors who could guarantee both a good economic and sporting project. In 2014, Peter Lim bought the majority stake in the club. Meanwhile, there was a total of €48m in player salaries unpaid, and no cash in the bank."
"Nevertheless, we are still winning. We have qualified for Champions League three times in our six seasons here, and won a trophy. It is no less, if not better, than the previous six seasons before we arrived. It is also in line with VCF’s Champions League qualification record throughout the club’s history."
The statement ended with Murthy saying that they are committed to building a sustainable club.
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