New choice Bernd Schuster will hope to stay around for longer than Jupp Heynckes, who won the Champions League in his one season in charge in 1998.

Since then the managerial merry-go-round has turned at dizzying speed with the likes of Vicente Del Bosque and, last month, Fabio Capello getting the sack after winning trophies of their own at the Bernabeu.

Schuster, 47, has yet to win a top honour as a coach - but he is the man to whom Real, where he starred in the late 1980s as a player, turned Monday.

"This is a great opportunity and a great day," said Schuster as club president Ramon Calderon presented him to the media by describing him as "one of the most brilliant players the club ever had."

Now the German must brace himself for his toughest coaching challenge in the most scalding of hotseats.

As a player Schuster was a precocious talent at Cologne, where he blossomed under legendary coach Hennes Weisweiler and soon made the full German squad, with whom he won the 1980 European Championship.

But, showing a petulant streak, he fell out with the German Football Association (DFB) and coach Jupp Derwall and quit the national side aged just 24 having won 21 caps, missing out on ever playing at the World Cup.

Even more staggering was Schuster's subsequent career in Spain.

He joined Barcelona in 1980 and stayed for eight years, scoring 63 goals in 170 appearances, winning a championship and three Cups and overcoming a 1981 knee injury inflicted by "butcher of Bilbao" Andoni Goikoetxea to star on a conveyor belt of talent including Diego Maradona and Gary Lineker.

But in 1988 he shocked the Catalans - and the rest of Spain - by heading to, of all places, Real Madrid.

In those days, crossing that particular sporting divide was almost unheard of - although nobody threw a pig's head at him, as was Luis Figo's fate after he made the same journey a decade later.

Schuster stayed at the Bernabeu just two seasons, both title-winning ones, scoring 13 goals in 62 games. He then crossed the city in 1990 to join Atletico Madrid, before three years later moving back to Germany after a 13-year-absence for three seasons in Bayer Leverkusen's colours.

Despite some spectacular goals the spell was not successful and in 1997 Schuster brought the final curtain down on his playing career with UNAM Pumas in Mexico before gaining his coaching badges.

He took charge at second division German side Fortuna Cologne in 1997 and a year later briefly took the reins at his old club FC Cologne, just relegated.

Schuster left in 1999, then joined Spanish second division side Xerez in 2001.

Promotion proved elusive and that meant a detour to Ukraine's Shakhtar Donetsk, where a failed title campaign brought the sack days before the team lifted the national cup.

In 2004 Schuster was fired again from Levante as the eastern Spanish side slid into division two, though they were just outside the drop zone when he left.

A year later he came to Getafe and after a season of consolidation the club last season flirted with the top six despite a budget some 30 times smaller than Real's 350 million euro pot of gold.

Given Getafe's lack of cash it may be noted the club's address is Avenida Teresa de Calcuta.

There was no pleading poverty, however, when the 17,000 capacity Coliseum Alfonso Perez witnessed a 4-0 destruction of mighty Barcelona in the second leg of the Spanish Cup semifinal, a result overturning a 5-2 first-leg deficit.

Despite the ultimate final loss to Sevilla, Marca sports daily described Schuster last season as a "guarantor of good football" and the epithet expresses just what Real say they are looking for.