“Robert Lewandowski is at the top, so the challenge is different”: World’s best footballer receives Michael Jordan comparisons from Polish National team coach during international break

Robert Lewandowski is football club Bayern Munich’s talisman – he’s been on world-class form for a number of years.

Paulo Sousa, Portuguese born and Polish national team manager is super stoked to have him on his team. He likens Robert Lewandowski to a certain Michael Jordan, someone who was head and shoulders above his teammates.

The footballing world is a funny place, the club teams draw the best talent from the world but the national teams are a different game. Sousa felt like Phil Jackson when he got appointed head coach in 2020, and went out of his way to meet Lewa prior to moving to Poland.

Phil and Paulo were in similar situations – they inherited the best player in the league at their primes. When Phil first met with Jordan, he had his apprehensions of whether he would buy into his program.

To ask the league’s best scorer to stop scoring is almost blasphemy, but it was necessary for him to win team titles. In the first three-peat, Jordan completely bought into the system.

His output did not even take that much of a hit, scoring an incredible average of 30 points and assisting 6 times a game. Lewandowski in the past three years has won everything there is to offer in football, including 3 league titles, a champions league and a league cup. If the Ballon d’or did not get canceled in 2020 (similar to MVP for football), Lewandowski would have won it for sure.

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Robert Lewandowski has to translate his club exploits to the national level

Since 2018-19, Lewandowski has scored 110 goals in 103 games. That is almost equivalent to MJ scoring 30 points on an average. That is where the comparisons end though.

While the Bayern Munich star has been in an incredible patch of form at club level, it has not translated to the national level. Sousa wants to make sure his player understood the assignment.  “The guy was already at the top but the challenge was to involve him in the process to make others develop their skills together. It was amazing and it was always in my mind with Robert.”

He has been his usual productive self, scoring goals for his country. But the level of players around him isn’t close to the same as the club level. It is time for Robert to sacrifice individual output for team success, similar to what Jordan went through to have success he desires at the national level as well. The Polish national team has not had any sort of success crashing out of group stages in the world cups.

There are similarities in mentalities between the Basketball great and the Polish marksman: They are always willing to learn the game. “Robert always listens intently when we have these tactical discussions with the team before matches and we are doing the analysis of ourselves and of our opponents.” says the Portuguese manager.

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