Spanish media on Thursday lamented as a “catastrophe” Real Madrid’s exit from the Champions League in the round of 16 for the sixth year in a row.

AS used the word as an accusatory single-word headline after French side Lyon dumped the big-spenders out of the tournament 2-1 on aggregate.

“A desolate reality, an unmitigated disaster, a continuing nightmare,” fulminated AS.

The pressure is now mounting amid a search for scapegoats.

“Out!”, said another sports daily, Marca, referring not so much to the club’s elimination as to what it expected to happen to coach Manuel Pellegrini, which the paper found to be primarily at fault for what it termed the biggest blow the club had suffered for 15 years.

“The Chilean (Pellegrini) once again failed on a decisive evening. He was badly wrong at Lyon (where Real lost 1-0 in the first leg) and it didn’t get better in the return. He is condemned,” said Marca.

ABC newspaper was also blunt.

“Pellegrini is on the ropes – more than 250 million euros ($A373 million) thrown in the dustbin,” said the paper, referring to the club’s summer outlay on the likes of Ronaldo and Kaka.

The club hierarchy has long thrown money at star names in the belief that ultimately such ‘galactico’ marquee names will bring success to the nine-times European champions.

But El Pais daily observed that the strategy has proved itself flawed.

“You don’t buy titles, you win them,” the paper said.

With Real ostensibly entering another vicious cycle of spend and hire, spend and fire, Pellegrini is now widely thought to be living on borrowed time, having only arrived last summer from Villarreal.

When Real last won the Champions League, in 2002, they promptly fired current Spain coach Vicente del Bosque, since then a dozen successors have tried and failed to emulate the man who won the title twice, aided by the original galactic incarnation underpinned by Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane.

What all those coaches have not been given is time.

The media pinpointed poor showings by Brazilian Kaka and Argentine striker Gonzalo Higuain, who hit the post when faced with an open goal.

Kaka gave way to veteran striker Raul in the closing stages and the Brazilian’s spokesman Diogo Kotscho slammed Pellegrini as a “coward” for withdrawing his man.

“A coach always designates a player to try to deflect attention from his own incompetence,” Kotscho said on Twitter.

Kaka said after the match: “I was not angry at the substitution but because of the (match) situation and because I knew I could not do anything more.”

© AFP 2012

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