IF YOU'VE had a bad couple of days and you believe in the German concept of Schadenfreude - deriving joy at the mess other people are in - then sit back, relax and revel in the utter, total pig's breakfast which Valencia FC is making of itself. Hey, crack open a little snifter of whisky while you're at it because we'll be here for a while. This is good stuff.

To appreciate how far Valencia have had to fall in order to be chest deep in a creek full of brown stuff, with nobody sure of the paddle's whereabouts, it's best to explain that between 1999 and 2004 Los Ché won two Spanish Leagues, one Spanish Cup, a Uefa Cup, and reached two Champions League finals while becoming the most relentless, pitiless footballing machine on the continent. Everyone feared them.

Even last season it took a 90th minute goal to ease Chelsea past Valencia and into the Champions League semi-finals - that's how strong the Spaniards were eight months ago.

Today they are the footballing equivalent of that guy you see on the high street, sitting on newspapers, covered in rags, drinking Buckie and shouting angrily at folk that only he can see. He used to be an accountant called Brian but you'd never know now.

Although the club's haemorrhaging of money and goals are more serious ills, the emblematic moment came last weekend when some of the Mestalla fans, normally amongst the most robustly aggressive and loyal in the world, applauded loudly when Athletic Bilbao's Paco Llorente scored the last of his team's goals in an utterly comprehensive 3-0 win. Valencia's faithful were signalling their wish for footballing euthanasia. Hurt us, humiliate us just help us get rid of this president and most of these players to put us out of our misery.

The route to such masochism can be traced through a literally unbelievable 4-0 aggregate humiliation by Norwegian side Rosenborg in Champions League Group H, a 5-1 home thrashing from Real Madrid, the sacking of coach Quique Sánchez Flores, a summer spending splurge which has left Los Ché burdened by a 260 million debt and a net, that's net, spend on transfers of 143m over the last four seasons.

But the beauty is in the detail. With a touch of magnificent class, the club last season responded to a request by their outstanding captain, David Albelda, that they renegotiate his contract by publishing his entire contract and bonus system in the local media. Real classy.

Valencia's best - and most consistent - player, Fabien Ayala was forced out against his will (becoming the most unwilling freedom of contract player at any leading club) because the then director of football (his long-term former team-mate Amadeo Carboni) resented Ayala's high wage.

Result? Without the outstanding defender Valencia have conceded more goals than all but one of the teams in La Liga's relegation zone.

Then, with timing which only goalkeepers could produce, Timo Hildebrand revealed with quivering lip that long-term incumbent and local legend Santiago Canizares has refused to speak to him since the German joined the club. "We're not friends and we don't speak. If he approaches me and says something I will respond but otherwise there is absolutely no contact".

And Canizares, scared that a clown show might be taking place without him, suddenly admitted that the reason for his ridiculously bad form was not his immature and unreasonable jealousy of Hildebrand but the fact that: "I've stupidly been playing through injury without telling the club. It's the worst thing I could have done." Oh dear.

It has all culminated in that most Spanish of phenomena, the "Panolada" when everyone takes out a white hankie and waves it in the air with derision, shouting "fuera fuera" (out out). Not once but twice this season already, against Athletic and Rosenborg the fans have used this most insulting mass demonstration of their anger. Now grafitti is beginning to appear around the Mestalla "Soler - do you realise you are destroying our club?" aimed at the president and "You are not fit to wear these shirts" at the beleaguered players. Oh, and Toyota are withdrawing their sponsorship.

Stuck in the middle of all this, at least until the transfer market opens in January, is the new coach Ronald Koeman. He's been angling after this job since he left Ajax in 2005 and it's the perfect proof of the aphorism: "Be careful what you wish for."

Since he joined, Valencia have lost three, drawn one and won two, with a 6-5 goal aggregate against them. It's a horror story.

"I think we've hit bottom," he grimaced after watching his team having their pants taken down against the Basques. "We lacked courage, conviction, self-belief and aggression. Believe me, there are going to be changes."

It's true, there probably will be and, in pure football terms, there is not so much wrong with Valencia that the rigorous bullying which Koeman is about to apply will not have positive effects. But it's with the pantomime villain of the piece that the main fault lies and, in Juan Soler, Valencia seems to have a president who stumbles from one piece of rank stupidity to another.

"We'll be the envy of Real Madrid and Barcelona," he bragged on taking office in 2004, this estate agent inheritor of daddy's fortune. Five coaches and no trophies later it looks like a sick joke. Soler appointed Valencia's former full-back Carboni as football director, even though the Italian had absolutely no buying, scouting or negotiating experience. Senora Soler and Carboni liked to shop together however. Fair enough then.

To add to the genius of this decision, Soler promoted Carboni over the coach, Quique Sánchez Flores, with whom the Italian had been conducting an open feud throughout his entire last season as a player at the Mestalla. Looking for trouble? He got it.

The two men bickered like Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher, simmered like Brown and Blair then shrugged off all niceties and went after each other spitting venom, vitriol and vengeance. Put a cobra and a mongoose in a sack and you're not far off.

Carboni's dismissal only preceded that of Sánchez Flores by about four months.

What else? Well when Albelda, a player like Bryan Robson or Roy Keane was to Manchester United, asked for his relatively low wage to be adjusted in line with the flash new signings who had joined the club, he was told to put it in writing. Soler then ordered that Albelda's demands and contract be made fully public.

"It's ridiculous and bad faith that the president should treat a simple request like this and publish intimate details of a private contract," stormed Albelda in the spring. "It all started in perfectly good faith and ended with a real bust up in the negotiations - it's incomprehensible."

Soler replied by saying that the club had "no money available". Then, as soon as the season finished, he spent close to 45m in signings. Cute.

And never mind Ayala's footballing value, his transfer market value was criminally ignored when he was being told he wasn't worth the money he wanted for a new deal. Despite signing for Villarreal on a Bosman, he never kicked a ball for the Yellow Submarine because Real Zaragoza decided to buy out his contract with Villarreal, paying 6m for the privilege. Ergo 6m which Valencia had just let trickle down the drain.

It truly is a risible way to run a club which, under Hector Cuper reached two Champions League finals in magnificent style and which, under Cuper, Claudio Ranieri and Rafa Benitez, played some of the most irresistible football of the last decade. Perhaps football's inexorable ebb and flow was always going to erode Valencia's fortress in the sand but the ineptitude, inelegance and consistent stupidity is hard to watch. Where will it end? Well the antipathy of the fans towards Soler is now irreversible. Attendances are down and, with a new stadium in construction (with a 70,000 capacity instead of the current 55,000), the 260m debt is utterly unsustainable. Social and financial pressure suggest that Soler is vulnerable and it won't take much for the natives to revolt around him.

"I turned down 42m net in wages from Chelsea to move to Valencia," explained their winger Joaquín this week. "But I've got no regrets because I could never have been as happy at Chelsea as I am here".

Perhaps president Soler is not the only halfwit at the Mestalla. Stay tuned.