Welcome to World Class: Robert Lewandowski

Scoring goals is every striker’s bread and butter.

All over the world you will find many attackers who can shoot goal after goal after goal, but for us at 90 mins, we need more than an impressive goalscoring record to qualify a player as “world class”.

As you should have seen in our previous review of this series, we judge players on a whole host of different attributes. Of course, the number of goals is the first thing we expect from an attacker, but we also want things like reliability, consistency and the ability to translate those goals into success.

There are a lot of boxes to fill in and it’s a system that we think gives us a fair representation of attackers, but it still wasn’t enough to do justice to Bayern Munich hitman Robert Lewandowski.

By discussing each player on our list of contenders, we managed to find at least one reason why each one cannot be described as “perfect”, but Lewandowski was different. He broke the metric by being the only man to maximize every criterion we set.

What makes Lewandowski so special is that we weren’t even surprised to see him break the system. The Bayern man has gotten into the habit of completely erasing expectations in recent years, so much so that seeing him do it once again hardly seemed remarkable.

Yeah, obviously Lewandowski is too good. According to.

“He’s not just the best number nine in the world anymore. Robert is the most complete and best player in world football. ”

– Lother Matthaus

After all, he’s a man who appeared in 47 games for his club last year and managed a comeback of 55 goals and ten assists. He only managed to score in nine matches in all competitions, one of which saw him come off the bench.

While these numbers are clearly ridiculous (even for Lewandowski), they are to be expected. The Pole has been doing this for years. He’s a man who only needed 332 games to score 250 Bundesliga goals – only legendary Gerd Muller reached that total faster.

There is consistency, then Lewandowski consistency.

They are not empty numbers either. Lewandowski has eight Bundesliga titles to his name, recently won the Champions League for the first time and received the FIFA Best Male Player award. He almost certainly would have had the Ballon d’Or in his hands had the prize not been postponed due to COVID-19.

Not only does he score goals, but he breaks records while taking on the European elite, and he has the trophy cabinet to show it. No player embodies what it means to be world class like Lewandowski.

Few can sum up Lewandowski’s current greatness like German legend Lothar Matthaus, who made the case for the forward to win his latest individual honor in his Sky Sports column.

“As the name suggests, there can only be one that’s the best. It’s Robert Lewandowski, ”Matthaus said. “He’s not just the best number nine in the world anymore. Robert is the most complete and best player in world football.

“With FC Bayern he won the five big titles that can be won. Champions League, Bundesliga, DfB-Pokal, DfL-Supercup and UEFA Super Cup. Moreover, he was also the top scorer in the first three competitions mentioned.

“His rivals Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar and Mbappe are all fantastic players – just like Lewy. The difference is he won every title there was to be won. Messi had a season without a trophy, Ronaldo became champion of Italy, it’s still great, but not as strong as a few years ago. “

Lewandowski has always aimed high. As a child he based his play on imitating the success of Roberto Baggio, Alessandro Del Piero and Thierry Henry, but there was a period when everything seemed like an impossible goal.

At the age of 17, Lewandowski struggled with the death of his father. A year later, a serious knee injury saw him released from Legia Warsaw. Not only was his football dream in tatters, his life was in danger of falling apart.

It was here that Lewandowski developed his elite mentality. Despite these terrible setbacks, nothing was going to stop him in his quest for glory.

He took care of his body and spent hours and hours perfecting his art to the point that no one could ignore him. His main goal was to score goals and succeed, and here we are, 15 years later, and not a single thing has changed. Eat, sleep, dominate, repeat.

Lewandowski has spent his entire career improving, proving he can score at higher and higher levels. Today, at 32, he has proven himself to be the best striker in world football.

No one deserves to be called world class like Lewandowski.

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