When Robert Lewandowski signed for Bayern Munich in 2014, we expected him to bang in goals at an impressive rate.
After all, the Pole was coming off the back of three straight 20-goal Bundesliga seasons with Borussia Dortmund, and the supply line at Bayern would surely help him continue at a similar rate.
What we maybe didn’t foresee, though, was the extra gear he’d develop, taking his goalscoring exploits from the sublime to the ridiculous and beyond.
After three straight 40-goal seasons, and 41 goals in 48 Poland games since moving to Bavaria, the 31-year-old has looked at a run that included a famous five-goal haul in nine minutes against Wolfsburg and decided “I can do better than this”.
Only two German teams have kept Lewandowski at bay this season: his former employers in the German Super Cup, and, perhaps more surprisingly, second-tier VfL Bochum in the cup.
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In 18 games for Bayern this season, he has 23 goals. To put that into context, his 16 goals in 11 Bundesliga games puts him five goals clear of next-highest scorer Timo Werner, while only seven players scored more across the whole of the 2018-19 campaign. Only Erling Braut Haaland has more than Lewandowski’s six in the Champions League, and only two players scored more than that in the 2018-19 competition. One of those two was, you guessed it, Robert Lewandowski.
Elsewhere in Europe’s big five leagues, Lionel Messi has nine goals in 11 games, Cristiano Ronaldo has six in 14 (as well as a lot more for Portugal), Kylian Mbappe has nine in 10, Raheem Sterling has 14 in 17 and Sadio Mane has 11 in 15.
At his current rate, Lewandowski is not just on course to eclipse his best Bayern season for goals (43 in 2016-17) - he’s due to shoot straight past the 50 goal mark and make it all the way to 60, providing he racks up as many games as he has in each of his five seasons at the club.
If you’d watched Lewandowski dominate Real Madrid in 2013, ensuring Jose Mourinho left the Bernabeu without a Champions League final, let alone a European title, you’d have struggled to believe he’d be even more dominant six years on.
The only word for his form this season is ‘frightening’. You might think you have the means to stop him, but in reality you have no chance.
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