Spanish does not have a precise translation for “cad”, but it hardly needs one, having lent the rest of the world a useful phrase to describe the sort of bloke who conquers partners by the dozen, boasts about his pulling power, disappears early the next morning and never phones. He is, we say, a bit of a Don Juan.

If Don Juan has an institution built in his spirit in modern Spain, it would be Real Madrid. Even in the promiscuous world of coaches, employers and their contracts, Madrid set unique standards of love ’em and leave ’em. As they make their 12th change of head coach in a decade, they have begun to make even Italy’s Internazionale - nine different coaches in 10 years but the same one for the past three - look like loyalists. Madrid have just fired Fabio Capello and he did not even get a phone call, the message delivered instead via his son. Mind you, the man who sent it, Pedrag Mijatovic, should also look over his shoulder. Madrid have the same fickle habits upstairs and downstairs. Director of football Mijatovic is the sixth incumbent in seven years. His boss, Ramon Calderon, is the latest of half a dozen presidents since 2000.

Within the next four days, Mijatovic will announce Real’s next conquest, Bernd Schuster, a blond from Germany to occupy a position held over the past 10 years by an Italian, another German, a Dutchman, a Welshman, a Portuguese, a Brazilian and four Spaniards, only one of whom, Vicente Del Bosque, lasted more than a fraction of a season and another of whom, Jose Antonio Camacho, astonished even the Don Juans of Real by joining and resigning twice from a job that registers on his CV a total of only three league matches.

Capello has left a couple of times too. Once bitten, twice shy. He resigned in 1997. In 2007, being dismissed, he’ll get a handsome settlement, some £6m. And, for the second time, he has left Madrid as champions. A fortnight ago, the club won their first major trophy for four years, a gap as long as any in Madrid’s distinguished list of honours over the past half-century. So, what had Capello done wrong? Designed a team unpleasing to the eye and one that failed to make an impression beyond the last 16 of the European Cup. Some of his personal choices in the transfer market - Fabio Cannavaro and Emerson, both from his former employers, Juventus - made a largely unfavourable impression on madridistas, and Mohamadou Diarra looked like a £24m midfielder only in the later stages of the campaign.

But it was not only these players who queued up to laud the motivational skill of the Italian coach as Madrid stalked the title dramatically and with surprising stamina in the final stretch of a thrilling La Liga denouement. Veterans like Raul said the same; so did some whom Capello left out of the side, such as Guti.

Capello has spent much of his career being whacked with the stick of aesthetics. Not many cared for the style of the Juventus team that he took to the top of the Serie A table twice in two seasons. His Milan of the mid 1990s - serial Italian champions, European champions in 1994 - are often compared for the worse to the Milan of his predecessor, Arrigo Sacchi, although the chief witness in this points-for-artistic-merit squabble tends to be Sacchi himself. On Friday he needed little prompting to offer his view on the Capello firing: his compatriot had not understood the need to “reflect the club’s culture” in the way they played, Sacchi volunteered. Madrid’s culture when Sacchi was director of football, it might be replied, involved players striking a more and more insolent attitude towards their bosses, fading at the end of matches and seasons and winning nothing.

But, if you put together all the men who have been in charge of Madrid’s first team, their strategies or their planning over the past decade, you could probably create plenty of squabbles. Then they would reach a total accord on one point: treachery comes with the politics of a place with an elected president. Carlos Queiroz, head coach in 2003-04, once described the job to this reporter with a memorable figure of speech. It was like being a pilot, he said: his employers at Madrid were delighted if the plane took off nicely with you at the controls and, when you asked about the landing gear, they changed the subject. To his credit, Queiroz thought this in his early weeks at Madrid, while he was coaching a successful, often brilliant team, long before they crash-landed.

The next man to play Biggles in the Bernabeu cockpit will be a populist choice in many ways. But one warning: he has a habit of strong take-offs and more rickety landings. Schuster has done well with clubs recently promoted to Spain’s top division, Levante and Getafe, and made them rise impressively. In Levante’s case, a steep plunge would follow. With Getafe, his latest, he has shown greater skill as a consolidator and having the suburban club in the Spanish cup final last weekend counted as a feather in his cap.

Schuster remains more celebrated as a player than as a coach and he was a star at Real Madrid in the late 1980s. Better still, he had moved there from Barcelona and won more league titles at the Bernabeu than Camp Nou. At Barça, he worked with Terry Venables, who later said Schuster had been as fine as any midfield player he ever coached. The German, for a while, out-shone Diego Maradona in popularity among barcelonistas. “Maradona even passed the ball to me,” Schuster likes to joke. Venables described a playmaker who “would attract the ball and, when he got it, could deliver the killing pass”.

Schuster also attracted controversy. His life off the field became almost as interesting as Maradona’s when pictures of Mrs Schuster - who also acted as his agent - appeared, seminaked, in a Spanish magazine. He was a maverick, with a long mane of blond hair who gave up international football young and in an era before it became fashionable to do so. His life as an expatriate would become a commitment. He is among very few to have played for all three of Spain’s traditional Big Three - Barça and both Real and Atletico Madrid - and he returned to the German Bundesliga only late in a long playing career.

Schuster the manager inherits a confusing Madrid, a side without Roberto Carlos and David Beckham. Perhaps just as well. Schuster once had a testy exchange of views on the touch line with Beckham at the Bernabeu when, as Getafe coach, he congratulated the England player for having just received a red card.

Schuster can be provocative. In Casa Madrid, he will need to hold his tongue.

Real’s hit list

With the exception of Vicente Del Bosque, who was in charge for four years, no Real Madrid manager has lasted longer than one season since Fabio Capello’s fi rst spell at the Bernabeu 10 years ago

2006-07 Fabio Capello sacked after winning championship

2005-06 Juan Ramon Lopez Caro

2004-05 Vanderlei Luxemburgo

2004 Mariano Garcia Remon

2004 Jose Antonio Camacho quit after three matches

2003-04 Carlos Queiroz

1999-2003 Vicente del Bosque 2 championships, 2 European Cups

1999 John Toshack

1998-99 Guus Hiddink

1998 Jose Antonio Camacho resigned in close-season

1997-98 Jupp Heynckes won European Cup

1996-97 Fabio Capello resigned after winning championship

Bernd Schuster - next man on the Real Madrid tightrope

Aged 47, born in Augsberg, Germany. Married to Gaby, they have four children

Gaby was also Schuster’s manager during his playing days. They were seen as a difficult couple. Known as the ‘Blond Angel’ from the time he joined Barcelona in 1980, he fell out with several of his coaches while Gaby’s forthright opinions saw her dubbed the ‘Dragon Lady’ n His move from Barcelona to Real Madrid in 1988 caused shockwaves because of the rivalry between the clubs

Schuster won 21 caps with West Germany and was part of the 1980 European Championship-winning side. He quit international football at the age of 24 after falling out with coach Jupp Derwall. Went into coaching in 1997 with Fortuna Cologne. Has shown promise in Spain and Ukraine but yet to win a trophy