Chelsea's €600m splurge has echoes of Real Madrid's misguided 'galacticos' era

Tens of thousands of madridistas, those with two decades or so of loyalty stamps on their season tickets, departed the Bernabeu on Wednesday night having glimpsed a piece of their own past.

They had just watched a club bearing the weight of record spending on players look impotent in a Champions League knockout. They had heard some bravado from one of that club’s senior executives before kick-off.

But these older Real Madrid fans could smile about it. The spectacular underachievers they had been watching was not their team but Chelsea. The boasts that soon assumed a very hollow ring had come from Todd Boehly, who heads the consortium that 10 months ago took ownership of the London club. He had forecast a 3-0 away win. Madrid finished as 2-0 winners of the first leg of the quarter-final.

Whatever calculations went into Boehly’s mistaken prediction, it was not recent form. Chelsea, under the fourth different head coach – including a caretaker, Bruno Saltor, and the current interim Frank Lampard – of Boehly’s short period in English football, have not scored any goals at all in their last six and half hours of trying.

It is one of the many poor returns on the €611m Chelsea have committed in transfer fees since last June.

Twenty years ago, Madrid were carrying around a similar reputation for extravagance. They spent the first years of the 21st century shattering individual transfer records. First on Luis Figo, then on Zinedine Zidane. But after that pair had featured in the victorious Champions League victory of 2002, Madrid’s hiring strategy lurched ahead with very little sense of balance.

Madrid teams of that era became known as the "galacticos", so starry were the names bought into the club, so many Ballon d’Or winners –