Since the 2010-11 season, there have been two classes of footballers. There's Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the aliens, in one class. There's everyone else, the humans, in another. It's not out of the ordinary for Messi and Ronaldo to score two hat tricks in a week, or to score a goal in every game for two months straight, but their normal is an outstanding feat for anyone else. And right now, Robert Lewandowski is on a Messi or Ronaldo kind of run.
Robert Lewandowski is on an unparalleled goal-scoring run, and he can get better
Lewa came here to score goals and chew bubble gum, and he’s all out of bubble gum.
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His five-goal game against Wolfsburg was likely the best performance we'll see from anyone this season. He came on as a halftime substitute and completed a hat trick by the 55th minute. He had his fifth goal by the 60th minute. It looked like this.
Credit: user omar_til_death on r/soccer
Lewandowski had a shot cleared off the line and a clear chance that he elected to pass in order to let someone else get in on the fun after that.
It wasn’t even a lucky five-goal game. He should have had seven. In one half. Against a Champions League team.
He followed it up with two goals against Mainz the following week and a hat trick against Dinamo Zagreb in his next Champions League game. Lewandowski scored in Bayern’s DFB-Pokal game earlier this season too, bringing his tally to 14 goals across all competitions in 666 minutes, or 1.9 goals per 90. That scoring rate will obviously come down, and drastically, but one goal per 90 is Messi and Ronaldo, clear Ballon d’Or winner stuff.
Last season, Bas Dost’s amazing 14 goals in eight games run came in 127 more minutes. Diego Costa’s seven goals in his first 330 Premier League minutes was an impressive, but much shorter burst to start a season. It’s been a while since we’ve seen anything like this, especially given that recent European top scorers like Luis Suarez, Francesco Totti, Luca Toni, Thierry Henry and Diego Forlan have taken penalties, free kicks, or both. Lewandowski takes neither.
Even his opponents are amazed. His former Borussia Dortmund teammate Mats Hummels seems to enjoy watching him wreck other teams quite a bit, even though Lewandowski left Der BVB on a free transfer and is now preventing them from winning trophies.
“He’s a goal machine. You can enjoy his goals, even as part of BVB. I had an incredible smile on my face when he scored his five goals. He’s just an exceptional striker.”
And then there’s Dortmund forward Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
Asked whether he can overtake FC Bayern München's Robert Lewandowski in the Bundesliga scoring chart this season, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang replied with a chuckle: "That will be difficult my friend."
Aubameyang only has one fewer goal than Lewandowski, and is on a team with much less depth. He will undoubtedly play hundreds more minutes than Lewandowski this year if he doesn’t suffer a serious injury, and yet seems to doubt his ability to score more goals than Bayern’s center forward.
And maybe he’s right. Because the most amazing thing about Lewandowski’s season is that his finishing isn’t even that great. On “Big Chances,” defined by Opta as clear-cut scoring opportunities, Lewandowski is only finishing 57 percent of them. Aubameyang is finishing 75 percent. Bayern creates an incredible volume of fantastic scoring opportunities and Lewandowski’s actually missing as many of them as you’d expect a slightly above-average, but not great, striker to miss.
There's also no Arjen Robben there to create his chances. No Franck Ribery either. David Alaba is being forced to play center back instead of bursting forward. The Bayern team around him might be the best team in the world, but there's a good chance they're not even the best version of themselves yet.
On Sunday, Lewandowski steps onto the biggest stage he’s had since this run started. Bayern takes on his old team, Borussia Dortmund, in a game that could end the Bundesliga title race in early October. And if he blasts through an exceptional Dortmund side just as easily as he did against Wolfsburg, Mainz and Dinamo Zagreb, it might be time to accept him as the world’s new top player, human division.
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