Manuel Pellegrini is under pressure from the Spanish media after Real Madrid were knocked out of the Champions League.
The campaign to remove the Real Madrid coach, Manuel Pellegrini, has already begun following their Champions League elimination to Lyon in the Bernabéu last night.
Real, who spent £240m on players during the summer including Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká, expected to fare better in a competition they have won a record nine times, and despite a vote of confidence from the club's director general, Jorge Valdano, the Spanish media appear to have made up their minds about the future of Pellegrini, launching a series of savage attacks on the Chilean coach.
The front page of the influential Madrid-based newspaper Marca this morning says, "Adiós Champions, Adiós Pellegrini. Fuera", which translates as the unequivocal message, "Goodbye Champions [League], Goodbye Pellegrini. Out".
This is the sixth successive season Real Madrid have been knocked out at the first knockout stage of the Champions League and with the final to be held at the Bernabéu this defeat has been particularly hard to accept.
"You don't buy titles, you win them," the columnist José Samano wrote in El País following the last-16 defeat to Lyon.
"When the ball is in play it's the business of the players and Hollywood-style theatre is irrelevant," he added. "Everything is possible in sport except for those who consider the pitch a stock market."
The hyperbole reached new heights with the opinion of Orfeo Suárez in El Mundo. "The catastrophe suffered by this pharaonic Madrid team is as if an earthquake had destroyed the Valley of the Kings.
"Watching the competition to which they owe their legend from the sidelines will be their penitence and torment."
There was no let-up in ABC, where Julián Avila wrote about "stratospheric spending" accompanied by the headlines "Sixth galactic failure" and "More than €250 million down the drain".
"The jewel in the crown, Cristiano Ronaldo, Champions League finalist in the past two seasons, is out of the tournament at his first attempt in a white shirt," said Avila.
Elswhere, Carlos Marcote, writing in daily El Periódico, said Florentino Pérez, the Real president, had failed in his attempt "to bulldoze Madrid back to the summit of world soccer".
"Not even winning the league… will remove such a scandalous stain, the worst in the recent history of Madrid given the such lofty heights they were obliged to reach."
