Life's 100 club is nowhere near as exclusive as football's. When a team scores 100 league goals in one season they don't receive a telegram from the Queen, but they do receive a place in the pantheon. Such an achievement was the norm in the Pleasantville world of the Forties and Fifties, but then so was dignity. A century of league goals have not been been scored in Serie A since 1950-51, and in England's top flight since 1962-63.

In La Liga it has only ever happened on three occasions: Barcelona this season, of course, but the other two instances were under British management. Bobby Robson's Barcelona scored 102 goals in 42 games in 1996-97, while John Toshack's Real Madrid managed a staggering 107 in 38 games in the 1989-90 season. Barcelona should get the five goals they need from their final three league games to break that record, but that hardly diminishes the achievement of Toshack's team.

What makes this triumvirate more remarkable is that all three managers were in their first seasons at their respective clubs – and, in the case of Robson and Toshack, their only full seasons. Real, who were chasing a record-equalling fifth consecutive La Liga when Toshack arrived, had a superb team, which contained four of the celebrated Quinta del Buitre and was described by the club president, Ramon Mendoza, as the "best Real Madrid side for the past 25 years". But never before or since – not with Di Stefano and Puskas, or Zidane and Ronaldo – have they hit such heights. And in an age of two points for a win, a league-winning margin of nine points represented a canter.

Real's form on the road was no more than decent by champion's standards, with nine wins from 19 games, but their statistics at the Bernabeu were simply mind-boggling. They won 17 and lost none of their 19 games. They scored 78 goals, an average of more than four a game, and only twice did they fail to score three. That record, which Barcelona won't be passing unless they put 18 past Osasuna in their final home game, was even more impressive given the mohican of dried mud down the centre of the left half of the pitch. Overall their scoresheet included two sevens, a six and four fives.

A bunch of fives was consistently rammed in opposing defenders' faces by the serial Pichichi Trophy winner Hugo Sanchez. He scored an absurd 38 in 33 games, equalling the record set by the remarkable Telmo Zarra for Bilbao in 1950-51. Apart from that the goals were spread throughout the team: the midfielder Rafael Martín Vazquez was the next best with 14.

Ironically, given what was to follow, the only additions Toshack made to the squad in the summer of 1989 were defensive. He signed the the uncompromising Argentine stopper Oscar Ruggeri from Logrones for £550,000, describing him with relish as a "mean bastard", and paid Valladolid £1m for a 21-year-old Fernando Hierro. Those two tended to play as the markers ahead of the goalkeeper Paco Buyo in a 3-5-2 system, with either Manuel Sanchís or the languid German Bernd Schuster at sweeper and the other in midfield. Chendo and Rafael Gordillo were the wing-backs, while the other central midfielders were the brilliant Spanish pair of Míchel, a cocky, virile playmaker of rare intensity, and Martín Vazquez, a waspish, technically superb ballplayer who was lethal from 20 yards. Emilio Butragueño, perhaps less prolific than we tend to remember but a constant creative menace in the hole, supported Sanchez with 10 goals and Sebastian Losada, a promising young striker who would ultimately retire of his own volition at 27, added eight league goals from just eight starts and four substitute appearances.

Despite the quality of the squad – or more probably because of it, and the consequent expectations – Toshack's start was not the most comfortable. Míchel classily passed them into the lead from 22 yards in the first five minutes of the opening game at home to Sporting Gijon, one of a number of brutally fast starts at the Bernabeu, but they were jeered and whistled towards the end of a routine 2-0 victory. Even though Madrid trashed the eventual runners-up Valencia 6-2 in their next home game, all was not well, particularly when Toshack committed two cardinal sins: losing to Barcelona and, worse still, going out of Europe at the first major hurdle.

Having drawn their first two away games 0-0, Real lost 3-1 at Barcelona in the third: this paper said that they were "close ... to a 9-1 defeat", and the misery was compounded when, absurdly given the scoreline, Schuster was sent off in the last minute for timewasting. If that result wasn't a reflection of the game, nor was a 2-1 aggregate defeat to their Milanese nemeses in the second round of the European Cup. The European Cup had become the holy grail for a club that had not laid hands on it since 1966, but Madrid were palpably inferior and drew heavy criticism for a perceived excess of physicality, most notably when Sanchís was sent off late in the second leg for booting Diego Fuser. In this paper, David Lacey wrote that "the club that won the first five European Cups by putting skill above cynicism have gone out kicking."

When they lost 2-1 at Real Sociedad three days later, with John Aldridge scoring the first goal, Toshack was under all sorts of pressure, even though Madrid were top with a perfectly acceptable record of six wins and two draws from the first 10 league games. El Pais reported that he had received a rollocking from Mendoza for his chippy dealings with players and the media, and that he would be replaced by the summer.

Yet the storm soon passed as Madrid began to put some serious scores on the doors. They won eight of the next nine, scoring 29 goals in the process, to lead by six at the halfway point, and would not lose another league game. They burned the rest of the league off with a remorseless consistency and, when they beat Barcelona 3-2 at home in mid-February to move six points clear at the top with 12 to play, and nine clear of Barça, there was a general acceptance that the race was run.

Not that Madrid were without hairy moments. In November they needed two goals in the last 15 minutes from Sanchez to overturn a 2-1 deficit at their future bogey ground in Tenerife. In January, Sanchez scored a late equaliser at Gijon. In March they scored twice in the last six minutes to come from 1-0 down to beat Sevilla, with the winner coming again from Sanchez. And even after the title was won with four games to spare – ironically by virtue of a 0-0 draw, away at Valladolid – they had to fight hard to maintain their unbeaten run. In the very next game, they recovered from 2-0 and 3-2 down at home to Logrones to draw 3-3; and six days later, in their final away game, they were 2-0 and 3-1 behind in the derby against Atletico before eventually drawing 3-3 after Hierro's Metgod-like 90th-minute free-kick.

That was one of a number of glorious goals. Perhaps the best came from a fairly unlikely source: Sanchís, who scored at Logrones after a stunningly accomplished one-two (after 6.10 of this video). There were more than 10 direct free-kicks from Sanchez, Schuster and Hierro, including Sanchez's gleeful spank from an apparently prohibitive angle in the 4-1 rout of Cadiz. There were Schuster's solo goals against Cadiz and Atletico, Aldana's delightfully insouciant lob into a space the size of a postage stamp against Malaga, and Losada's overhead kick in defeat at Sociedad; there was Butragueño's exquisitely delayed pass for Míchel against Osasuna and Vazquez's cake-icing rasper in the 7-2 win over Zaragoza. Vazquez also scored from a ludicrous angle against Castellon.

After that game, a 7-0 evisceration, David Lacey wrote: "There is something not quite right about the way Real go from strength to strength in their domestic competition after looking second rate in the European Cup." The failure to progress in Europe certainly cast a slight shadow over the season, as did the Copa del Rey final defeat to Barcelona, and the gap between Serie A and La Liga has rarely been bigger than it was in the late Eighties.

Domestically, the competition might have been stronger: Barcelona lost their first three away games and, at that stage, were a truly effective team only in Johan Cruyff's dreams. But this is all nitpicking really. The bald facts say it all: Real scored 107 league goals. And even though Toshack was gone by November – sacked, funnily enough, because of domestic rather than European results – the memory of the good times will surely endure. Even if he lives until he's 107.

You can see all 107 of Madrid's goals by clicking here, and here. You can get brief details of their league fixtures here and full details of their entire season here, including complete line-ups for their 6-1 win over West Brom in the semi-final of the end-of-season San Jose Trophy in California.