Barcelona striker Robert Lewandowski revealed that a late night with Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp was a changing point in his career. The Polish superstar had a great start to his career, scoring 62 goals in 114 games for Znicz Pruszkow and Lech Poznan in his homeland, but it wasn’t until he moved away that Lewandowski became known to the rest of Europe. Lewandowski joined Borussia Dortmund in 2010 for about € 4 million and played four seasons for Klopp’s successful team. Lewandowski scored 103 goals in 187 appearances for Dortmund, helping the club win two league titles, one DFB-Pokal, and a trip to the 2012/13 Champions League final, where they were defeated by Bayern Munich. Together with Mario Gotze, Marco Reus, Jakub Blaszczykowski, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Lewandowski led an attack that became a cult favorite among football fans.
Lewandowski then went on to dominate German football for eight seasons with Bayern Munich, scoring 344 goals in 375 games and winning the Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal, and, most significantly, the Champions League. The Pole also established a number of records, including the most Bundesliga goals in a single season, with 41 in 2020/21, breaking Gerd Muller’s previous best of 40. Not to mention the time he scored five goals in 8 minutes and 59 seconds after coming off the bench against Wolfsburg. He’s now La Liga’s leading scorer for the season, having joined Barcelona last summer, but things could have gone so differently.
Although winning the Bundesliga, Lewandowski struggled in his debut season with Dortmund, scoring only eight goals in 33 Bundesliga games. He had also started the second season slowly, with only four goals in his first ten games (two of which came in the cup), prompting him to speak with then-Dortmund manager Klopp. Following a 3-0 Champions League loss to Marseille, Lewandowski sought out Klopp to learn more about the German’s objectives and expectations for the striker. Now Lewandowski has now admitted that what was supposed to be a fast conversation evolved into a 90-minute one-on-one that revolutionized his career, regarding the now-Liverpool manager as a father figure.
“One incident, I believe, affected the course of my career. It was my first season, or rather the start of my second season, at Dortmund. I wasn’t in great shape, therefore I didn’t score as many goals. I had no idea what Jurgen expected from me,” Robert Lewandowski said about his chat with Jurgen Klopp. “I went straight to him after a game that we lost. It was probably around midnight at the hotel. ‘I want to speak with you because I don’t understand and I’m not sure what you want from me, what you want from me,’ I explained. And this chat was like, I assumed we’d talk for five minutes, ten minutes, but we ended up talking for an hour and a half.”
“The most essential thing was that I was speaking to him as if I were his father. And I missed my father because he died when I was sixteen. Maybe I haven’t found somebody who can talk to me like that since that time,” he added. “Three days later, and keep in mind that you can’t adjust anything in training because you don’t have time, we were playing in the Bundesliga, and I scored a hat trick and assisted on one goal as we won 4-0. I believe that was Augsburg. Because I didn’t change anything, I realized that mentality and what you have in your head are quite significant. But I felt some liberation as if my mind was clear. Everything changed after that.”
Following his hat-trick against Augsburg, Lewandowski went on to score 17 more goals in the Bundesliga that season, bringing his season total to 22 as Dortmund won their second straight league title. It was Lewandowski’s first 20-goal season in the Premier League, and he has only failed to achieve that level once, scoring 17 in his rookie season with Bayern Munich.
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