Robert Lewandowski interview: Longevity, rejection, and his Barcelona future

“I was always fighting to show everyone. I was fighting to show I was the right guy. To change the game. I always believed in myself, to show everyone that everyone who thought different was wrong.”

Robert Lewandowski is 37. He is in his 16th season at the elite level, having won league titles, the Champions League and a bucketload of other honours with Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich and Barcelona. He has scored 392 league goals for those clubs, plus another 265 in assorted other competitions, including his early years back home in Poland.

And yet, a small corner of his mind still belongs to the short, skinny kid who didn’t think he was going to make it, who was released by Legia Warsaw when he was 17, and had to start again in the Polish third division. There’s still a bit of him that thinks he has something to prove.

Maybe that’s what partly explains his extraordinary longevity. It’s not just that he’s still playing professional football as he nears turning 38 in August, it’s that he’s still playing for one of the world’s great clubs at an age when most of his contemporaries have either retired or have moved to rather less demanding surroundings. That alone should probably illustrate that longevity, but here are a couple of facts to underline that.

Only two men have played more minutes in Europe’s top-five leagues since he joined Dortmund in the summer of 2010: Atletico Madrid forward Antoine Griezmann and Valencia midfielder Dani Parejo.

Even then, there are notes with regard to their non-domestic league games: Parejo has four international caps against Lewandowski’s 139 (plus no international tournaments, which eat into summer recuperation time) and has played 107 European club matches as opposed to the Pole’s 150, Griezmann has a comparable number of internationals for France, but not as many European (150 vs 108) or domestic cup (62 vs 45) outings.

And then there are goals. Only one player has scored more since 2010: Lionel Messi.

None of the other players in the top 10 have been in those leagues over that exact time period, so this table isn’t perfect as a comparison, and this isn’t to necessarily argue he’s better than them, but it illustrates his consistency over an extended period. After his first season in Germany, when he took a few months to settle, Lewandowski has scored 25 or more goals in every single full campaign he’s played. He got 42 last season, when he was 36.

Even this season, when by his own admission he hasn’t played as much as he would have liked, he still has 11 league goals in 1,052 minutes. That’s one every 96 minutes: basically a goal a game.

Of course, this level of longevity isn’t an accident.

Lewandowski is talking to The Athletic in an interview arranged to mark the launch of clothing brand Mackage’s ‘Protect Your Craft’ range, which to him means ‘to respect the unseen work behind every visible moment’. And that unseen work underpins his lengthy career.

“I started, when I was 21, 22 years old, to think about my future, my whole career, and that time already I knew if I can help myself with the nutrition, with a healthy lifestyle, I can play maybe two, three, four years longer at the top level,” he says.

It was then he cut out gluten and lactose, after noticing that he would be sluggish and unable to train as he wanted following his usual breakfast of cornflakes and milk, as well as the odd sweet treat:

“I thought that because I was skinny — skinny with muscles — I could still eat chocolate. I thought I could eat whatever I wanted, because I didn’t have any fat. But when I trained, I didn’t have any power, and I couldn’t understand why. I was sleeping well, but I couldn’t train with the same intensity as my team-mates. So I started to change. And even after a few weeks, it made a huge difference.”

That was when the influence of Lewandowski’s wife, Anna, a former world-level karate medallist who has since become a nutritionist and owns a fitness studio in Barcelona, really started to have an impact. She would often come to him to suggest a tweak to his diet, or a different sort of supplement. “I thought I knew a lot about nutrition and a healthy lifestyle,” he says, talking about the suggestions Anna made, and still makes.

Would he still be playing at the elite level aged 37 if he were married to someone else? “I don’t know, but she helps me a lot! Especially at the beginning of my career, because she helped me see the difference when I was doing this thing, or not doing it. Maybe without her help, I couldn’t reach the level I am.”

Here’s another extraordinary thing about Lewandowski: he’s never really had a serious injury. He had issues with a knee and a hamstring in his early years in Poland, but since joining Dortmund, the longest run of games he has missed in one go, due to injury, is seven. That was in 2021 when he was at Bayern, and a strained knee ligament ruled him out for a month. He had groin surgery at the end of 2019, but it was artfully timed during the German season’s winter break, so he didn’t actually miss any games.

Otherwise, there have been strains here, knocks there, and he has played games when not 100 per cent, but for someone who has averaged 56 appearances for club and country — most of them at the very top level — over the past 15 full seasons, his durability is pretty remarkable.

“I don’t know what’s in his DNA,” Barcelona head coach Hansi Flick said in November, “but he recovers in three weeks from injuries that should last five.”

But it’s quite telling that when his fitness record is raised, Lewandowski immediately focuses on the times he has been injured, and that while he has perhaps not missed a large number of games, he has had to sit out a few important ones.

“I have had some injuries that I was out for a few weeks, but it was the most important part of the season: for example, in the Champions League in 2021, I couldn’t play against PSG (in either leg of a quarter-final Bayern lost on away goals). Also, last year I couldn’t play in the semi-final against Inter (missing the first leg, then only playing the 30 minutes of extra time in the second).”

In his mind, there are goals left out there, time on the pitch that could have made his numbers even more impressive. That kid released by Legia comes through again. “Even when I scored 41 goals in the (2020-21) Bundesliga,” he says, “I did it in 29 games because of my injuries. If I played (all) 34 games, maybe I would have scored 50.”

The relative lack of injuries probably isn’t an accident. Because of the physical and nutritional steps he took earlier in his career, plus the fact he played a wide range of sports — basketball, volleyball, handball and athletics, as well as football — when he was a boy, Lewandowski’s body is extremely flexible, and therefore durable. “Agility and flexibility are helpful on the field,” he said in the 2023 documentary Lewandowski: Unknown. “If there is a hard collision, I can walk away unharmed.”

The body is one thing, but the biggest reason for his longevity probably rests between his ears.

When asked what a ‘strong mentality’ means to him, Lewandowski says: “It doesn’t matter how many goals I had already scored: it was the goals I was going to score. It doesn’t matter how many titles I’ve won: it’s the next title I have to win. Not thinking too much about what I have achieved. That is maybe for when I have finished my career.”

This is where Anna comes in again.

“She is my first psychologist: after a good game or a bad game, she is the first person I talk to, about not only the football, but about my mind. What I’m thinking, what I’m feeling. It’s important that I can speak to someone like this. She knows me a lot, and she can tell me what I can do, not only in a football situation, but also with my team-mates or coaches. Even though she doesn’t shoot, she’s still a part of me.”

We then come back to that idea that he’s still, on some level, trying to prove wrong whoever it was at Legia that decided to let him go, that they were the football version of that record executive who infamously turned down the chance to sign The Beatles.

Perhaps that is what’s behind a sort of tunnel vision that isn’t penetrated by anything else, a powerful sense of self-motivation.

In that documentary mentioned earlier, Jurgen Klopp, his head coach at Dortmund, says: “Lewandowski is the only player who could play in Pyongyang (the capital of North Korea), without any audience, and still score goals.” It’s worth noting he broke the Bundesliga scoring record in 202-21, and won his only Champions League title a year earlier, with Bayern when the Covid-19 pandemic meant there were no fans in the stadiums.

Beyond the physical stuff, and even the mental aspects, one reason for his longevity is his adaptability. Lewandowski has played for, in chronological order: Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti, Jupp Heynckes, Niko Kovac, Flick, Julian Nagelsmann, Xavi and now Flick again. That’s a range of different managers, with very different personalities, very different demands and very different systems. But he has excelled for all of them.

“I am the sort of player who can play every type of football,” he says. “I can adapt to many different tactical things. If we are playing counter-attacks, no problem. I can play in every type of tactic. I can learn a lot and adapt. I can play in every system. I was always open to everything, and I can learn and adapt very fast.”

Again, this adaptability is a confluence of the physical and mental. “Many of my coaches told me my body is so flexible that I can adapt to everything very fast. One of my coaches told me that I am the guy who, if he wanted to show the other players a new exercise, I was the player who would understand and adapt very fast. If I see something, I analyse it a little bit but then I could do it automatically. I maybe analyse the body language or movement. I think that has helped me a lot.

“I’m not a player whose most important skill was speed. I use speed, and still do, but I am a player who tries to find space, to think, to be more intelligent, and because of this, maybe speed is still not the most important thing. So maybe this is why you don’t see a huge difference (in performance now, as opposed to earlier).”

The spectre hanging over all of this is what happens next.

Lewandowski’s contract is up in the summer, and The Athletic has reported the expectation at Barcelona is that he will leave. There has been interest from Major League Soccer, notably Chicago Fire, but nothing concrete has emerged, and Lewandowski himself insists no decision has been taken yet.

“I don’t know,” he says, when asked if he wants to stay at the Camp Nou. “Because I have to feel it. For now, I cannot tell you nothing (about what I will decide), because I’m not even 50 per cent sure which way I want to go. It’s not for this moment.”

This is theoretically a big decision, and it might be one taken out of his hands should Barcelona decide not to offer a new contract. But outwardly at least, he seems pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

“I don’t put pressure on myself — probably when I was 25 or 30 that would have been different,” he says.

“With my experience and the age I am, I don’t have to decide now. I don’t have the feeling of which way I should decide. Maybe in three months is probably when I have to decide. But still, I don’t have any stress. I have to feel it. I have to start to feel it, then it will be easier for me when we talk about my future.

“I only decide the way I want to go if I feel it. For now, I don’t know, and I don’t think about this.

”Being at Barca over the past few years has allowed me to see how much dedication and work goes on behind the scenes to move the club forward. There is a strong sense of ambition and belief in the future, and that creates a lot of motivation for everyone inside the team.

“For a club like Barcelona, stability and trust in the long-term project are very important. I believe in continuity and in people who truly understand the values and identity of this club. I wish our president, Joan Laporta, the best in the upcoming (presidential) election, and I’m confident he will continue working to guide Barca toward more success.”

That sounds like a ‘come and keep me plea’. But wherever Lewandowski plays next, you’d imagine he will still be scoring goals, still finding space, still learning, still fighting to show anyone who thinks he’s not “the right guy” that they are wrong.

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