VALENCIA, SPAIN — “It is like a dictatorship,” Jose Pérez told me. Two coffees, one cortado and one café con leche, were on the table, plus my notebook and a phone to record. Two and a half hours before kick-off, but far less until Pérez, president of fan protest group Libertad VCF (‘Free VCF’), would surely be called away to lead a passionate demonstration against Peter Lim’s ownership of Valencia Club de Fútbol.
It was 19 May, 2024, with Valencia set to take on La Liga’s surprise package, Girona, in their final home match of the 2023–24 season. I had just asked Pérez whether there was anything the club could do to improve its communication, and mend a broken relationship with supporters.
As I ended the question, Pérez, and a fellow Valencianista friend of his who had spotted him in the coffee bar, chuckled. There was a wry smile on the face of both men, and I realised Pérez need not answer; the moment to make peace had long passed, in their view.
The protest of the day was primarily framed as a boycott of Valencia’s Mestalla stadium. Fans were asked by Libertad VCF to remain on the street as the match played on, leaving thousands of seats empty inside, to send a message which “hurts” those in charge, Pérez said. It was to be the second walkout of its kind — the group having successfully campaigned for a boycott in May 2022.
Pérez did respond, in depth and with patience for an uninformed Scottish journalist, eventually using that word ‘dictatorship’ four times. The spark of revolution, impatient to catch afire, had been in the muggy air all afternoon in this relaxed Valencian barrio.
An anticipation of what was to come chipped away at the nervy cheerfulness in fan chatter on Avenida de Suecia, a wide street which Mestalla’s main stand backs onto. With the hum and honking of traffic on Avenida de Blasco Ibañez in one direction and the green tranquillity of Jardí del Túria in the other, the road (which translates as ‘Sweden Avenue’) is an important cog in Valencia’s gridiron street network.
Avenida de Suecia, lined with Valencia fan bars below typically Spanish apartment blocks, also holds a pivotal role in the history of the city’s biggest football club. Not just the legal address of Valencia CF, it has hosted jubilant street parties to celebrate the club’s greatest triumphs, like the La Liga wins of the early 2000s, and a lively crowd welcomes the team bus here every matchday.
On this mid-May afternoon, it was to be the hotbed of the latest fan rebellion. A decade of ownership under Singaporean billionaire Lim had “crushed, shut up and silenced” the Valencia fanbase, Pérez said. With the days of cheering their trophy-winning players on the stadium balcony above long gone, the atmosphere on Avenida de Suecia when the protest later kicked off was volatile and messy — as it has been for countless other recent demonstrations, including the previous Mestalla boycott.
After that headline-making day two years ago, why has nothing changed? “[The boycott] has happened again because they continue killing Valencia Club de Fútbol,” Pérez declared. He is a man who speaks with absolute certainty in his views, determined to transmit an exhaustion felt by many Valencianistas.
“What people in the dark have to understand is this: what would happen at your football club if whoever owned it wasn’t interested in things going well on the pitch?” he continued. “But [Peter Lim] also wasn’t interested in the club doing well financially, and he isn’t interested whether or not the fans are happy either. Instead, he is trampling on us, humiliating us.”
This article is an excerpt from Archie Willis’ cover feature story for FUTBOLISTA Magazine ISSUE 12, released September 2024. To read the full feature and many more on Spanish and Portuguese football, purchase a copy of the magazine for just £7.99 plus shipping.
