In May 2019, the Allianz Arena crowd was awash with joy, but also sadness.
Club legends Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery starred in their last home game for Bayern Munich.
Club president Uli Hoeness was one of many supporters crying in the stands
amid the general outpouring of love, gratitude and regret that greeted the iconic duo’s departure.
Even Robert Lewandowski,
a man who can rarely been accused of excess sentimentality, appeared deeply moved.
After eight fantastically successful years, Lewandowski has bid Bayern farewell,
leaving in the dead of summer rather than in front of 75,000 supporters,
with bouquet of flowers in hand. What a contrast.
Lewandowski’s stealthy departure feels sadly out of step with his extraordinary
body of work for the club - 344 goals in 375 games in all competitions - but then again,
star players don’t always leave Bayern in the right way.
Franz Beckenbauer’s farewell in 1977 was cool and business-like as financial disagreements over his
transfer to the original New York Cosmos of the old NASL, problems with the tax authorities and
unsavoury tabloid headlines about his private life forced him to up sticks to the US.
Bayern felt sufficiently guilty over their treatment of Der Kaiser
that they arranged a belated testimonial for him 33 years later.
The late Gerd Muller left in even more ignominious circumstances,
three months before the end of the 1978-79 season.
The club’s greatest ever goalscorer was substituted by coach Pal Csernai
eight minutes before time with Bayern 2-0 down to Frankfurt. A couple of days later, he was off to
America too, joining Florida’s Fort Lauderdale Strikers. Muller never played in Germany again.
But an icy parting of the ways doesn’t necessarily impact on a player’s historical standing;
Beckenbauer and Muller will forever be universally adored legends at Bayern.
But whether Lewandowski achieves the same status is less clear.
For all the goals he has scored and trophies he has won (the Bundesliga in all eight seasons,
along with one Champions League, three German cups and a Club World Cup), he’s
never struck up much of a connection with Bayern, the supporters or Munich.
Described as a “unique machine” by team-mate Manuel Neuer in light of
his phenomenal physical shape and reliability, Lewandowski’s seemingly-computerised dependency
delivered for the club on an industrial scale but never truly touched the soul.
A devoted self-optimiser who reached a world-class level through hard work and game intelligence,
Lewandowski didn’t have time for fraternisation.
He never hid the fact that goals were his sole motivation either, to the point that whoever’s
shirt he was wearing at the time he scored them might have felt almost incidental to him.
After two seasons under Pep Guardiola and one year with Carlo Ancelotti failed to bring the
Champions League trophy he coveted above all else, Lewandowski went public with his frustrations.
He also blamed his team-mates for missing out on the leading goalscorer trophy
on the last day of the season in 2016-17, finishing one behind Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
“I was not happy with the way the team helped me (in the last game),
I was angry and disappointed about the team’s attitude,” he said.
Lewandowski wasn’t shy about showing his misgivings on the pitch either.
Wingers’ failure to find him was often greeted by an ostentatious shake of a head.
In 2018, he hired Pini Zahavi as his agent,
with a view to facilitating a move to Spain’s La Liga. But uncharacteristically poor performances
against Real Madrid in a 2017-18 Champions League semi-final defeat killed any chance of a transfer.
Rival interest from Chelsea in England was met with Bayern intransigence.
But when further attempts to engineer a move came to nothing,
a remarkable transformation seemed to happen at the start of 2019-20.
Lewandowski was suddenly much more of a team player, staying behind after training
to help and advise Bayern’s youngsters, and playing a far less egotistical game.
“For a long time, he wanted to score many goals. Now he wants to score goals to win games, with
the team,” team-mate Thomas Muller said of his fellow forward’s newly-found collective streak.”
Club sources felt Lewandowski’s transformation
could be explained by the fact he had at last stopped fretting about a transfer.
He became even better as a result, and so did Bayern — finally winning the Champions League in
the pandemic-enforced eight-club mini-tournament UEFA cobbled together that August in Lisbon.
Lewandowski was desperately unlucky that the Ballon D’Or was not awarded that season,
again because of COVID-19, but he did win the first of two consecutive
FIFA Player of the Year awards to mark yet another milestone.
The following year saw him break Gerd Muller’s single-season scoring record,
a barely-believable feat made possible by the concerted effort of the team.
But last season, interests diverged once more. Bayern were sounding out Erling Haaland over a
move from Dortmund and were thus unprepared to offer Lewandowski a lengthy new contract. The
player reacted by saying something “had broken” inside him, and openly agitated for a move.
Relations inside the dressing room had also deteriorated.
While Lewandowski and head coach Julian Nagelsmann had differing ideas on tactics,
a number of players were resentful that everything at Bayern seemed to
revolve around the centre-forward. They will miss his goals, if not the drama.
Many Bayern fans, one suspects, will feel the same.
Lewandowski’s hard-nosed professionalism isn’t the
only reason they have failed to fully warm to him, though.
Strangely enough, for the best Bundesliga player of modern times, his enduring excellence has
made a relatively small mark on Bayern’s psyche. Part of that has to do with timing.
Their decade of uninterrupted domestic dominance, it’s important to remember,
started two seasons before he arrived under Jupp Heynckes, with whom Bayern won the treble
in 2012-13 while playing Mario Mandzukic up front. The club then pulled further
away from their German competition with false-nine aficionado Guardiola in charge the following year.
Lewandowski’s arrival for 2014-15 encouraged Guardiola to reconsider his
ideas of how a team should play and made Bayern’s national hegemony unassailable.
Eight more titles in a row have been largely inevitable but the law of diminishing returns
meant that every goal and every league win was slightly devalued by the next.
Meanwhile, a combination of freak injuries and poor team performances
saw Lewandowski never score that one, unforgettable, pivotal goal
in the Champions League — the competition that really mattered to him and his club.
Truth be told, he was even largely peripheral in the three one-off
knockout ties Bayern won in Lisbon, even including that 8-2 hammering of Barcelona.
His lack of emotional impact on and off the pitch can, of course, not detract from the objective,
sustained brilliance of his performances, nor his historic achievements. But it does explain why his
legacy in Munich, unlike that of “Robbery” and the greats from the ’70s, will remain contested.
For a man of such monumental numbers, Lewandowski leaves behind rather little love.