After last season, doubts crept in about Robert Lewandowski. The veteran striker had 19 league goals, but the team finished second to Real Madrid in La Liga and the coaching staff wondered if, at his age, he still had the pressing ability and off-the-ball requirements to lead Barcelona’s line.
They considered selling him.
Six months later, Lewandowski is still with Barcelona, which sits atop La Liga, having thrashed Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, his old club, in the past month. Lewandowski is the leading scorer in Europe’s top five leagues across all competitions, with 19 goals in 17 matches.
What changed were the staff members who doubted him. Hansi Flick replaced Xavi as the coach, and the team also added rising stars from La Masia, the team’s youth academy, such as Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsi, awakening the Catalan club as a European force.
Lewandowski, who turned 36 in August, has been a vital part of that success.
But even for a player of his vast experience, the Polish striker admits there has been a steep adaptation process since he arrived as the team’s marquee signing in summer 2022.
“It might be difficult to compare with other clubs, but everything gets very noisy at Barcelona,” Lewandowski told The Athletic. “I have learnt in these years in the club how to stay away from this. At the start, I read and heard a lot of disinformation and, in some cases, I didn’t understand why it was happening.”
But, he said, once he better understood the new media landscape, he decided to disconnect from it. “I don’t focus anymore on these things; it’s too much and not good for the long term of your career.”
It has not been just the media that has taken some adjustment for Lewandowski. He plays a significant role in a locker room full of precocious talents. He is 19 years older than Yamal and Cubarsi, 16 years older than Gavi, and 15 years older than Alejandro Balde, Marc Casado and Fermin Lopez.
At a time when Barcelona needed them, given the financial constraints on the club, the next generation has stepped up and made a huge impact on the first team. For older players, particularly those who did not come through La Masia, it has been important to understand and embrace these rising stars.
“Youngsters are completely different now,” Lewandowski said. “When I was younger, when a veteran told me to do something, I would obey them directly without a single question. Now it’s different. It’s not good or bad, don’t get me wrong, it’s just different. They are fearless in every sense and not only in football. Society is like that. Youngsters are more fearless and self-confident.”
Flick has acted as a unifying factor between those two worlds, the old and the new. When he was appointed, some saw only a German manager who did not speak the language, but he embraced the job, improved the team and very quickly won over the skeptics.
Lewandowski had worked with Flick at Bayern, achieving great success in 2020 when they won the Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal and the Champions League. The striker, who was named UEFA player of the year during his time in Munich with Flick, says the 59-year-old’s management has been critical to Barcelona’s progress.
“Not just as a coach, he is a very direct and fair person,” Lewandowski said. “Even with the players who do not play, he will try to speak to you and tell you the truth.”
The admiration is mutual. In September, after Barcelona beat Getafe 1-0 on a goal from the striker, Flick said: “Lewandowski is, for me, the best No. 9 in the last decade of football.”
Lewandowski said he appreciated the public praise, but that is not what matters to him. Last season, Xavi was complimentary about Lewandowski with the news media, but that did not translate in the club’s planning in May.
“The most important thing is what he says to me in private, in the dressing room, in meetings or every day in training sessions,” Lewandowski said of Flick.
“There’s even sometimes he does not say something to the media but he says it to me directly. This is key.”
It has been an unusual path to football’s elite for Lewandowski.
He played for five Polish teams from ages 17 to 22, progressing each time, before securing a transfer from Lech Poznan to Borussia Dortmund in 2010. During his time at Dortmund, Bayern Munich and Barcelona, he has scored 525 goals in 674 games. He can also feel aggrieved to not have won the Ballon d’Or in 2020 when the award was canceled because of the pandemic. With Poland’s national team, he has scored 84 in 156 appearances. In Europe’s top five leagues, he has won 11 league titles, four domestic cups and the Champions League with Bayern.
“In a way, strikers need to be selfish sometimes,” he said, reflecting on his prolific scoring. “There can be situations where the team is not finding their way and the strikers, for the position we play in, can make a difference by doing their own thing.”
He added that there were two positions in the game that require a different kind of personality: goalkeepers and strikers.
“We both can make a difference out of nothing,” he said.
This mentality reflects his era, which was led by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. It is hard to stand tall beside them, but Lewandowski said he was proud of his legacy. Only Messi and Ronaldo have more than his 101 goals in the Champions League.
“I think I’ve been close to that elite level in some moments and even beat them in different games,” Lewandowski said. “I think we can say I was around! It means a lot if you get close to guys like this. It makes me very proud to see that in the era of Messi and Ronaldo, sometimes, Lewandowski also managed to break some records and make an impact.”
In 2022, Lewandowski signed a three-year contract with Barcelona, extendable to a fourth season if he played more than 50% of minutes in the 2024-25 campaign. Everyone at the club expects that number to be reached and for Lewandowski to remain Barca’s No. 9 for another year.
“Maybe in two or three years, I feel like I don’t want to play anymore at the top level, but in this age, you can’t know exactly what’s going on,” he said. “But I feel that I am where I dreamt to be, in the right place with the right people.”
Lewandowski’s contract at Barcelona has been a frequent subject of discussion around the club. He is one of the top earners, and the team’s president, Joan Laporta, revealed in September that the striker offered to “adequate his contract” in a way that could help Barca’s finances to register the new signing Dani Olmo on time.
“If we get the club to a better place,” he said, “that’s going to have a good impact on me, too, so that’s a win-win and the best way to live my profession.”
Barcelona is doing plenty of winning at the moment and is in line to qualify automatically for the Champions League round of 16. Lewandowski, at the ripe old age of 36, is playing a starring role.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright 2024
This story was originally published November 27, 2024, 7:04 PM.