Quite a bit of news has been pushed to the background recently with the club focused on Copa and the Barcelona game.
Diakhaby, of course, was suspended for four games, after being sent off after provocation at the end of the Getafe game. That should have been the end of it, but instead the president of Getafe, Angel Torres, relit the fires with an extraordinary tirade, lambasting Marcelino for events a decade ago when he was at Gijon, criticising Valencia for celebrating "as if they had won the world cup" and, most crucially, deriding Diakhaby as "morenito" a racially derogatory term. In response, Valencia have been considering filing an official complaint, even though Torres apparently phoned the club to apologise. I keep an eye on opposing fan forums and on the Getafe ones, though they're coming off with the usual ones about biased referees etc, most of them are saying he should just shut up and let it go.
Of existing players, both Kangin Lee and Parejo saw extended contracts, which is important for the club. In the case of the former, besides being a promising talent, the commercial potential of having a rising star of Korean football is immense. In the case of Parejo, he will always be divisive, but he has been at Valencia a ridiculously long time and is a motor through which the team moves. His renewal extends his contract to 2022 instead of next year, with the release clause staying the same at 50 million. He's currently 24th on the list of Valencia players who have played most games with the likelihood of him overtaking people like Quique Sanchez Flores and Carlos Marchena to break into the top 20 by the season's end.
Valencia confirmed several rumoured transfers recently. The official exit of Aderlan Santos was one. Good luck to him, he was utterly rubbish when here.
More importantly, VCF have secured, or are close to securing, the addition of several young players. It has to be said that Valencia's attempts to secure promising youth on the cheap in recent years has been more miss than hit. Bakkali and R De Paul arrived to fanfare, but were judged not good enough, though the latter may have been a mistake in hindsight. Medran, Racic and Maksimovic all have some sort of link to the club, but it looks unlikely they'll ever feature again. So the signings come against that backdrop.
The most important is Manu Vallejo, who turns 22 next week. He has a similar playing position to Guedes, playing as advanced left winger or centre forward. With Cadiz B, he netted 58 times in 94 games, before making the jump to Segunda, where he's been probably the breakout young player this year in the whole division, with 8 goals and 3 assists in 26 games, pretty credible for a midtable team and I'm optimistic about this one. The transfer fee was 5.5 million, with a further 3.5m in add-ons, 10% of any future sale and Cadiz having first option on any Valencia players sent to Segunda on loan.
The second, joining us on a free transfer, is Salva Ruiz. He was once touted as a great promise at left back, making his debut at age 17 playing the full game in the second leg of the Copa Del Rey in 2012. By coincidence, Gaya had made his first team debut in the first leg of that game. Ultimately, Ruiz was let go, but the club has decided to give him a second go, though he'll rejoin the reserves.
Strongly rumoured, though not yet officially confirmed, are the additions of Jason from Levante and Jorge Saenz from Tenerife. The first has done well as a winger with Levante and would join on a free, while the latter would be 2 million and is a promising Spain under-21 central defender.