Robert Lewandowski was battling against the odds at Barcelona.

As their disappointing 2023-24 season came to a close, senior decision-makers at the club were open to the idea of selling the veteran striker after just two seasons at Barca. He had scored 19 league goals as they finished runners-up to Real Madrid in La Liga (to add to 23 goals in his first season), but Xavi and his coaching staff believed Lewandowski, who turned 36 in August, did not have the pressing ability and off-the-ball requirements to lead the line anymore.

Six months later, Barcelona are top of La Liga, have thrashed Madrid and his old club Bayern Munich in the past month, and Lewandowski is the top scorer in Europe’s top five leagues across all competitions, with 19 goals in 17 matches.

Many things have changed at Barca during that time. Hansi Flick replaced Xavi as head coach, wonderkids from La Masia, such as Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsi, have continued their impressive rises and the Catalan club has awoken as a European force. Lewandowski has been a vital part of that success, scoring more goals than games played in both La Liga and the Champions League.

Even for a player of his vast experience, the Polish striker is the first to admit there has been a steep adaptation process since he arrived as their marquee signing in the summer of 2022.

“It might be difficult to compare with other clubs, but everything gets very noisy at Barcelona,” Lewandowski tells The Athletic in an exclusive interview this week. “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 then I understood how this media world works in Barcelona and I decided to be completely out (disconnected 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’s not been just the media landscape that has taken some getting used to for Lewandowski. The 36-year-old plays a significant role in a dressing room full of precocious talents. He is 19 years older than Yamal and Cubarsi and there is a 16-year age gap between him and Gavi, as well as a 15-year one with Alejandro Balde, Marc Casado and Fermin Lopez.

Lewandowski and Yamal celebrating during the Clasico win earlier this season (Angel Martinez/Getty Images)

At a time when Barcelona needed them given the financial constraints on the club, the next generation have stepped up and made a huge impact in the first team. For older players, particularly those who did not come through the club’s academy, it’s been important to understand and embrace these rising stars.

“At the beginning of my time here, I needed to understand the new generation — their thinking and everything,” says Lewandowski, who is speaking in his role as an ambassador for the digital entertainment marketplace G2A. “I had to learn Spanish as well, but then I started talking with them about different subjects at lunch tables or moments we had together. It’s easy for me to talk about the experiences I’ve had in my career, or simply when I was a teenager.

“Youngsters are completely different now. 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.

“Over the last year, I feel I have clicked in a better way with them. I usually sit at lunch with several youngsters and we speak about life. I listen to their worries and they ask what I used to think at their age. In a way, we were very similar, but I saw the world from a different perspective to what they have now.”

Flick has acted as a unifying factor between those two worlds, the old and the new. Eyebrows were raised when a German manager who didn’t speak the language was appointed in the summer, but he embraced the job, improved the team and very quickly won over the doubters.

“Every individual in the club is doing better,” says Lewandowski. “We, the players, are doing great on the pitch. I also think we all feel stronger. When you have this fitness preparation we have now, you don’t need to worry about keeping the physical demands of the game and then also think about how to beat your opponent. We now know we are fine, we have the power and the legs to do what we need.”

Some players present for Flick’s first training sessions told The Athletic they were impressed by the German’s knowledge of every La Masia graduate and what they could bring to the first team. Even the youngsters were impressed by this and the confidence he instilled in them has been translated onto the pitch, as seen in the emergence of less-heralded players such as Casado and the now-injured Marc Bernal.

Lewandowski, of course, had a past with Flick. They worked together at Bayern, achieving great success together in 2020 when they won the Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal and the Champions League. The striker, who was named UEFA’s player of the year during his time in Munich with Flick, says the 59-year-old’s man-management has been key to Barcelona’s progress.

Flick and Lewandowski after being named coach and player of the year in Germany in 2020 (M. Donato/FC Bayern via Getty Images)

“I think the first time I spoke with him this year was in the period when Barcelona were looking for a new manager (Xavi left the club on May 24). It was a short period, about two or three weeks before the start of summer,” he says.

“When I got the information, I was very happy because I knew what was going to happen. I’ve worked a lot with Hansi and we don’t need to talk too much — we understand each other very easily and don’t need too many words. When he tries to explain something, I can understand straight away the way he wants to convince us to play. This is one of the things I like the most about him.

“Not just as a coach, he is a very direct and fair person. Even with the players who do not play, he will try to speak to you and tell you the truth. I think all the players appreciate that because if someone is fully honest with you, then you can understand their decisions better.”

The admiration is mutual. In September, after Barcelona beat Getafe 1-0 thanks to a goal from the striker, Flick didn’t hesitate in saying: “Lewandowski is, for me, the best No 9 in the last decade of football.”

“I am very glad to see that the coach supports me. But for me, at this point of my career, seeing what somebody says to the media is not that important,” Lewandowski says.

“The most important thing is what he says to me in private, in the dressing room, in meetings or every day in training sessions. There’s even sometimes he (Flick) does not say something to the media but he says it to me directly. This is key.”

Lewandowski speaking to The Athletic about life at Barcelona and excelling in the Messi-Ronaldo era (Eduard Duran for The Athletic)

The striker’s words might take you back to last season when Xavi was complimentary about Lewandowski in media duties, but that did not seem to translate into the club’s planning in May.

“I don’t refer to any moments in particular, but in my career, I have seen that, sometimes, what is going around is not totally real. The value of the words, for me, is bigger when anyone says it in private to me,” Lewandowski says.

“There are a lot of politics as well in the industry. I know too much about this business. I am not the guy who believes if someone says an opinion about anything… I prefer to listen to certain things myself to then trust them.

“This is not only for me I think. For the rest of my team-mates, too. The most important thing is what we discuss indoors, between ourselves.”

Like plenty of his team-mates, at Barcelona and his previous clubs, Lewandowski is a big fan of gaming and has been for a long time.

“As far as I remember, I loved playing games in my free time,” he says. “Even now, when free time is something very valuable, it just allows me to switch off. It is a space of time when I don’t think about anything else. I am so focused and feel in a different world.”

This feeds into what he says is a “very natural” link-up with G2A, who describe themselves as the world’s largest marketplace for digital entertainment. 

“I have been a huge fan of Formula 1 and NBA for years, so I play those games. Now I also spend a lot of time on military games. I remember when I was like 20, at Dortmund, we were playing online with the rest of our team-mates. We were like 15 different players in the same game. In that time, without family, it was probably easier,” he says with a laugh.

His number one priority in life is his family — his wife Anna, who he married in 2013, and his two daughters, Laura (aged 14) and Klara (aged 7).

“The first place goes to my family,” he says. “Whenever we have time and opportunity, we spend time doing things, talking, and being together. Children give you a different perspective, you are responsible for them and you watch them develop their interests, look for their own hobbies and pursue them.

“I love showing the world to my daughters.”

Lewandowski has scored 525 goals in 674 games during his time at Borussia Dortmund, Bayern and Barca and 84 in 156 appearances for the Poland national team. In Europe’s top five leagues, he has won 11 league titles, four domestic cups and lifted the Champions League with Bayern (as well as being runner-up with Dortmund in 2013).

It has been a far from usual path to football’s elite, too. He played for five different Polish teams between the age of 17 and 22, progressing and getting better moves each time, before securing a transfer from Lech Poznan to Dortmund in 2010. He has never looked back and can feel aggrieved not to have won the Ballon d’Or in 2020 — when the award was cancelled due to the pandemic — after a truly outstanding season at Bayern Munich.

“In a way, strikers need to be selfish sometimes,” he says when reflecting on his goalscoring. “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.

“I think that there are two positions in the game that require a different personality from other footballers: goalkeepers and strikers. We both can make a difference out of nothing.”

This mentality perhaps reflects the era he has lived and played in: led by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, two prolific goalscorers who motivated themselves through fierce ambition to be the best in the sport. It is hard to stand tall beside those two, but Lewandowski believes there are many reasons to feel proud of his legacy — and to know that he has gone toe-to-toe with those two greats in spells and at times even surpassed them. Only Messi and Ronaldo have more than his 99 goals in the Champions League; he could hit 100 on Tuesday against French side Brest.

“I have been playing football in the same era as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. I think I’ve been close to that elite level in some moments and even beat them in different games. I think we can say I was around!” he says.

“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.”

Lewandowski and Messi facing each other at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar (Michael Regan – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

Sustaining greatness is the biggest challenge for the next generation, such as Yamal and Cubarsi, according to Lewandowski. Earlier this season, he described Yamal as “the best winger in the world at the moment”. It was big praise — not just from a team-mate, but from a striker who has been surrounded by some of the world’s best wide players throughout his career.

“Every young talent in the world needs to have the challenge to not just reach the top of football, but to stay there,” says Lewandowski. “And for me, nowadays, this can be even more difficult than before.

“Now you have social media, footballers with money from a young age, maybe you win some titles and you have a lot of people saying you are great… all of this can be difficult to process. If you don’t build up the mentality in the right time, later on, it can be complicated to figure out the tougher situations.”

In 2022, Lewandowski signed a three-year contract with Barcelona, extendable to a fourth season if he played more than 50 per cent of minutes in the 2024-25 campaign. Everyone at the club expects this clause to be triggered and for Lewandowski to remain Barca’s No 9 for another year.

Are there more plans in Lewandowski’s mind beyond that?

“I can’t do too many long-term plans right now. I see myself very well now,” he says. “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. But I feel that I am where I dreamt to be, in the right place with the right people.

“The way Barca fans have supported me, it’s been amazing. In games but also in my daily life, it’s been special.”

He is targeting the 2026 World Cup with Poland, too: “I want to be part of the qualifiers and we will see. For me, it’s special to play for my country, I can never say I’ve had enough. I feel I have this power to help them on and off the pitch.”

His contract at Barcelona has often been a subject of discussion around the club. Lewandowski is one of the top earners and last September, in a press conference, president Joan Laporta revealed the striker offered to “adequate his contract” in a way that could help Barca’s finances to register new signing Dani Olmo on time.

“I would prefer not to talk about details,” says Lewandowski when asked what exactly he proposed to the club. “For me, it is that being a part of Barcelona is not just being a player. I think I can be an important figure in the club in all departments. I like to share what I think, my opinions. I’ve had many experiences in football, management and everything around the industry, so I think my thoughts can be helpful.

“When I spoke with the president, I shared my thoughts. I am a person who is not afraid of sharing opinions. Not to attack anyone, but just discuss the best solutions for the club.

“If we get the club to a better place, 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 are doing plenty of winning at the moment, six points clear of Real Madrid at the top of La Liga (albeit their rivals have a game in hand) and 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.

(Additional contributor: Mark Carey)

(Top photo: David Ramos/Getty Images)