We’ve now seen enough of the new European season to make some meaningful observations. Or have we?

The question mark is necessary because some decidedly bizarre things are happening. Nowhere more so than in Spain, where Real Madrid is enacting a sequence of events of soap-opera stupidity.

The star of yesterday’s episode was coach Jose Camacho, who quit a mere three games into the season and after only four months in the job.

The recent history of Real, arguably the world’s most widely supported sports entity, adds up to blunder piled upon blunder. Things started to go off the rails early last year when club President Florentino Perez suddenly announced that he was firing coach Vicente Del Bosque.

Well, of course – all Del Bosque had done during his three and a half years in charge was to win two Spanish league titles, two European Cups, and the world club cup.

By far the most successful coach in the world, Del Bosque was ushered out. Perez explained that blunder with some suitably silly PR twaddle about Del Bosque’s “traditional profile” not being good enough for the new, modern image of Real Madrid.

What on earth did he mean? We found out when Portuguese coach Carlos Queiroz was brought in. Handsome, urbane, multilingual, and widely traveled, Queiroz represented the new image. Out went the chubby and somewhat unkempt Del Bosque, whose soccer experience had taken him no further afield than a lifetime’s devotion to Real Madrid would allow.

Beneath Queiroz’s smoothly suited appearance there functioned a sharp soccer brain. He quickly realized, and let it be known to Perez, that the club needed to sign a reliable defender or two.

Perez ignored the advice. He was interested only in signing galacticos – glamorous superstars, and such players are never defenders. Real already had three of the world’s top players – Ronaldo, Figo, and Zinedine Zidane – on its books when Perez made another flamboyant move, signing the English idol David Beckham.

At one point it seemed that Queiroz was to get a defender. A press conference was arranged to announce the signing of the Argentine Gabriel Milito. At the last minute it was canceled after the Real medical staff discovered that Milito had a suspect knee.

This strange decision proved to be yet another blunder. Milito promptly joined Real Zaragoza and played the entire Spanish season without any knee problems.

Perez, having spent millions on his galacticos, naturally wanted them on the field as often as possible. Another blunder. As the season wound down in May, Real was an obviously weary team with an increasingly fragile defense.

It simply collapsed, and failed to win anything at all. Its fourth place finish in the Spanish League meant that it missed out on automatic entry to this year’s Champions League.

The humiliation of having to play qualification games for a tournament that it had dominated for so long was the last straw. Perez made another move and fired Queiroz. To replace him he called up Camacho.

Ahah! This was more like it. Now the club was getting a former Real player, a guy who had once been known as a hard-nosed, uncompromising defender. Just the man to sort out all those galacticos egos.

Camacho even managed to persuade Perez to bring in a couple of defenders: the Argentine Walter Samuel, from Roma, and England’s Jonathan Woodgate. The signing of Woodgate was decidedly odd – apparently those same doctors who determined that Milito had a shaky knee found nothing wrong with Woodgate, a player with a history of injuries. In fact, Woodgate arrived injured, and has yet to play a game for Real.

Another blunder needs to be mentioned. Real Madrid is run as a social club – every four years its members get to elect their president. Back in July, they gave Perez a huge vote of confidence. He got nearly 91% of the nearly 22,000 votes cast.

Thus empowered, Perez could not resist the lure of another unnecessary star signing. He shelled out $14 million to buy the English goal-scorer Michael Owen from Liverpool. Now all that Camacho had to do was to turn the stars into a team.

Two bleak and unconvincing 1-0 wins in the Spanish league were followed by a disastrous 3-0 defeat at the hands of Bayern Leverkusen in the Champions League. Camacho reacted to that miserable performance by – gasp! – dropping both team captain Raul and marketing icon Beckham for this past weekend’s game against Espanyol.

An ill-omened day for Real. Figo and Zidane were unavailable due to injury. Goalkeeper Iker Casillas dislocated a finger in the warm-up. Owen, starting for the first time, played poorly, and was substituted at halftime. Ronaldo missed a penalty kick. Substitute goalkeeper Cesar injured a knee. Samuel and fellow defender Michel Salgado were both red-carded. Nothing worked, and Real went down 1-0.

Camacho had had enough. He saw no hope, and, virtually admitting that he had found this group of players unmanageable, told the press: “Things are not going to improve if I stay, so I decided to go.”

No sooner had speculation about Camacho’s replacement started than Perez sprang another surprise. The temporary replacement – Camacho’s assistant, the 53-year-old Mariano Garcia Remon, who was Real’s goalkeeper from 1971 through 1986 – was not temporary after all: “He will be there for this season and we hope for many years longer,” said Perez.

Talk about deja vu. This was exactly how Del Bosque got his job in 2000, suddenly replacing a fired coach. Garcia Remon felt obliged to acknowledge that Del Bosque had done “a fantastic job … but the situation now is different.”

Maybe it is time for a meaningful observation after all. A common-sense observation, which means that it is more absurd than any of the extravagances mentioned above.

Vicente Del Bosque is now coaching in Turkey. What if Perez were to admit he made a mistake in firing Del Bosque, that results on the field are more important than image considerations, and were to lure him back from Istanbul?

Yeah, that is a pretty silly idea. It would be even sillier if Del Bosque were to agree to it.