Same old story. Just two weeks ago, Real Madrid, currently stuck in fourth place in the Spanish League standings, assured its coach Vanderlei Luxemburgo that all was well, that he had the full support of the club.

A sure warning for Luxemburgo to start packing. The axe fell on Sunday. Exit Luxemburgo, with the usual line from the club that it wasn’t an easy decision and the thanks for all he had done during his short stay.

Eleven months is all the time Luxemburgo got to turn around the chaotic situation Real Madrid had got itself into by the end of 2004. He came in as the club’s fifth coach in two and a half years, a sure sign of a rudderless club.

What had gone wrong? Nothing more complicated than Real failing to live up to its own history. Real has long been aristocrat of the world’s soccer clubs – in 2000 it was voted FIFA “Team of the 20th Century.” It wasn’t even close – Real got over 42% of the vote, second place Manchester United got 9.7%.

Real has been a perennial winner – one peek into its incredible trophy room, an impenetrable jungle of glittering silverware, confirms that. But there was more. There was class, there was style in the way Real played futbol, there was never anything merely average about its performances or its players.

Real Madrid needs a roster bristling with star players, and it was a promise of ever more stars that got Florentino Perez elected as the club’s president in 2000. Perez, the multimillionaire head of a pan-European construction conglomerate, quickly delivered. Portugal’s Luis Figo came that same year; France’s Zinedine Zidane arrived the following year for a world record transfer fee of 75 million Euros paid to Italy’s Juventus; Brazil’s Ronaldo came in 2002; England’s David Beckham in 2003.

But all that talent proved difficult to mold into a team. The only titles that really matter to Madrid are the Spanish league and the European Cup. In Perez’s five years at Real, the club has, by its own exalted standards, done poorly: just one European Cup and two league titles.

Having supplied the world’s greatest players, Perez concluded the lack of trophies must be the fault of the coaches. The coaching merry-go-round started in June 2003 when Perez fired Vicente Del Bosque – even though Del Bosque’s Real had just won the Spanish league. Carlos Queiroz arrived and was fired after one season in which Real won nothing. He was replaced by Jose Camacho, who quit after only three games in charge. His assistant, Mariano Garcia Remon took over – “We hope he will be there for many years,” Perez said. He lasted just three months, until Luxemburgo was hired in December 2004, Real’s first-ever Brazilian coach. But Luxemburgo’s Real also failed to win anything.

With Luxemburgo now defenestrated, up steps reserve team coach Juan Ramon Lopez Caro “on a provisional basis.” Confronting him are the results of Perez’s blind pursuit of star players, the galacticos. The policy began to go wrong with the purchase of Beckham in 2003. Beckham was not, is not, a world-class player. But he is certainly the most marketed player in the world, and he was coveted by Perez for that reason. As one of Perez’s circle famously remarked, “Just look how handsome Beckham is, the class he has, the image. The whole of Asia has fallen in love with us, they all want to shag us, because of Beckham.”

The sexy, marketable Beckham has never done much for Real on the field. They have won nothing since he joined them. On present form, the current team does not look capable of altering that dismal record. It is still bulging with stars – only Figo has departed, replaced by the 18-year-old Brazilian starlet, Robinho. But most of Real’s other recent purchases have been utterly ordinary.

The depth of Real’s fall was shockingly revealed to everyone a week ago when arch rival Barcelona came to the Bernabeu and walked all over the hosts, winning 3-0 with a wonderful display of the type of flowing, attacking soccer that used to be Real’s trademark.

Real’s fans jeered Luxemburgo and his team off the field – but they did much more than that. They did the unthinkable, they stood to applaud Barcelona’s Brazilian star Ronaldinho after he had scored his second goal. And what an irony was contained in that gesture! For that same Real official who two years ago had praised Beckham’s sex appeal, had also said: “Between Ronaldinho and Beckham, I’d go for Beckham a hundred times. Ronaldinho was too ugly to play for Madrid.”

Last week, Ronaldinho won the Ballon D’Or as Europe’s best player, and he is expected to win FIFA’s Player of the Year later this month. Last year, Ronaldinho led Barcelona to the Spanish league title. This year it leads again, with Real in fourth place. As if that isn’t enough humiliation for Real to bear, it gets worse. Barcelona’s top scorer, the Cameroonian Samuel Eto’o, was a Real player when he was 19, but the club decided not to retain him.

Real, headed for its third straight season without a trophy, has become a rather ordinary team. There are occasional flashes of the old magic from Ronaldo and Zidane, but not enough to quell the panic that has evidently gripped Real’s front office. The solution seems clear: the appointment of a strong coach, sensitive to the Real tradition of attacking, entertaining soccer, who must be given time to rebuild the team. Names are circulating: Rafael Benitez of Liverpool, Arsene Wenger of Arsenal, England coach Sven Goran Eriksson.

There is also the Italian Fabio Capello, currently coach at Juventus. Capello has been here before. He coached Real to the league title in 1997 and was promptly fired by Perez’s predecessor, Lorenzo Sanz. Capello’s problem was that he had Real playing counter-attacking, Italian-style soccer. Very un-Real soccer.

Now it seems, such is the frantic desire for a winning team, that Capello, complete with his Italian style, may be welcomed back. There have been reports in the Spanish media that Real and Capello have already reached an agreement for next season. Capello has denied such a agreement, calling it “Fantasy football.” That fits rather well, for marketing fantasy seems to overshadow – temporarily no doubt – soccer reality in 21st century Real Madrid.

pgardner@nysun.com