This week’s newsletter has been subject to a friendly takeover by my friend, colleague and occasional padel partner Tariq Panja, who spent some time talking to Robert Lewandowski a few weeks ago. The fruits of their conversation are below. But because I dislike not getting the chance to sound off on things on a regular basis, and would otherwise have to bore my wife with my thoughts on the #Barclaysman phenomenon, I’ve contributed some thoughts after his bit.
Robert Lewandowski has been famous for a long time. And as one of the most successful players of his generation in the world’s most popular sport, he knows that attention comes with the job. But he is also a dad.
So, like most elite soccer players, he must do a lot of planning and preparation when it comes to something as simple as going out for a stroll with his family, particularly if he leaves Castelldefels, the exclusive coastal enclave near Barcelona where he now lives.
Over the years, he developed a tool kit for outings. Sunglasses and a cap are standard, even if they probably won’t fool the fans liable to mob him. But now any such outing also includes a preliminary chat with the person who decides how much Lewandowski can, and should, interact with the public: his daughter Klara.
“We have an agreement that she can always tell me, ‘Yeah, you can do this’ or, ‘No,’ if she’s feeling stressed,” Lewandowski said in a recent interview. “Because for the kids, it’s not a normal situation.”
In Europe, players of Lewandowski’s caliber, even as he nears the end of a trophy-laden career, are catnip for hordes of selfie-seeking soccer fans. So having a few hours out with the family can often mean striking a balance between meeting the needs of an eager and demanding fan base, especially one as large and as passionate as Barcelona’s, and those of his young family.
Lewandowski’s face is so widely known that he understands that he is, in a way, public property. At times, he said, he enjoys the upside of being famous, and the positivity that can come with interacting with the multitudes of people who want to wish him well.
He long ago came to understand, he said, how to live in the public glare, acknowledging that it is “part of the business.” But sometimes, he said, there have been instances when it has been scary, when grown men have shoved aside either his wife or his young daughters to get close to him. And that is why he has the agreement with Klara.
“Klara, you have to tell me when you are together with Mom or me how you’re feeling,” Lewandowski said of a typical conversation. “Should I take the picture with the fan or say: ‘Sorry, it’s my private time with my child. I cannot.’”
By next year, Lewandowski will have been a professional soccer player for two full decades, long enough to have given him a front-row seat to the social-media-fueled evolution of soccer stars from sporting figures to cultural icons, to know what it is to play in an age when success is no longer measured in goals and trophies but also in followers and impressions. (Lewandowski has more than 35 million followers on Instagram; his wife, Anna Lewandowska, a former karate champion, has more than 5.6 million.)
His musings on fame came as he prepared to enter his third season with Barcelona, a club that by virtue of its record of success and its role as a foil to the other Spanish superteam, Real Madrid, generates more heat, attention and commentary than almost any other team in sports.
As he enters the twilight of his career, which has included appearances in two Champions League finals and two World Cups, Lewandowski, 36, is of the view that careers like his — and those of peers like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — are unlikely to be repeated.
Much has been said about the increase on the workload expected of top players today, of the ever-increasing number of games played at a high intensity, but the mental toll of expectations and fame, Lewandowski said, is just as likely to lead to burnout. For even the best players, commentary on social media — much of it increasingly abusive — is impossible to completely block out.
“I remember the time that we were living without social media,” he said, before talking about managing the expectations and opinions that flip from one extreme to another in real time.
“OK, we are athletes, but in the end we are also human,” he said. “We also have emotions, and also we know staying strong mentality is very important because now it’s easy to say something on the internet in a way you would not say it in real life.”
Much has been written about how Lewandowski, with the help of his wife, has taken care of his body, constantly tweaking his diet and introducing new workouts. Lewandowski said that he has for years been just as focused on developing his mental side, on perfecting ways to block out the noise and negativity. That was particularly important last season, when his form dipped and the criticism — of his play, of his age, of him — seemed to grow by the day.
“Unfortunately you cannot live in this time, in this world, and not be strong mentally,” he said.
At Barcelona, Lewandowski gets to work with some of the best young talents in the game at a club whose sense of self is bound up in nurturing the stars of the future. Lewandowski’s success this season, for instance, will most likely be determined by his relationship with Lamine Yamal, the braces-wearing teenage forward whose stunning performances at this summer’s European championships were a big reason Spain emerged victorious.
Those performances turned Yamal into one of the most famous people in the world almost overnight. So it is hardly a surprise that it is Yamal, still only 17, and not Lewandowski on whom many Barcelona fans are pinning their hopes. Lewandowski believes applying that kind of pressure and expectation on the bodies and minds of young talents is taking its toll in ways that are different than what happened when he started out.
“You know that the young people have already got so many injuries at a young age,” he said. “We cannot expect later that players are going to play 10 years at the top level because of the mental side, because of social media. It’s very tough.”
The demands, though, never end. The Champions League will be played under a new format this year. FIFA has expanded its Club World Cup. And the World Cup, to be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico in less than two years, will be the biggest in history.
Some top players have already spoken out about those increased demands, saying that they simply cannot be expected to meet them. Lewandowski is among them. He is convinced that the quality of games cannot be maintained, particularly alongside the ever-higher price to be paid for fame. He has seen enough by now to know that there will eventually be consequences.
“For sure that’s going to be the problem for football,” he said.
#ChildhoodIsPrecious
Issues that have the power to unite soccer fans of all stripes are vanishingly rare. There may, in fact, be no more than two.
One: Pretty much everyone, with the notable exception of Sam Allardyce, seems to have decided that they do not particularly like Sam Allardyce.
And two: Absolutely nobody thinks there should be an international break at the start of September, when Europe’s major leagues are just getting going and the story lines that will captivate us until the point when Manchester City streaks off into the distance are just starting to unspool.
Still, there are ancillary benefits. Having criticized the role X/Twitter plays in my life last week, it is only fair to mention that the app has, over the last two weeks, exposed me to the wonderful #Barclaysman trend: highlights of Premier League cult heroes from the years 2002 to 2016, set to landfill indie tunes from that period.
This should, really, be used as a launchpad to discuss the power of nostalgia in soccer fandom. Or to wonder if the Premier League has lost some of its charm as it has become slicker, and better produced. Or to query whether soccer itself is now sidelining the mercurial or the maverick. But it is better, I would argue, simply to watch two minutes of Steed Malbranque and to remember that, yes, Steed Malbranque made people happy.
Center of Attention
Bad news, everyone: There is another Chelsea section in the newsletter. Still, we can take solace from the fact that this week’s chaos at Stamford Bridge is at least a little thematically different from all of the previous installments. Chelsea’s owners have now bought so many soccer players that they have turned their attentions, instead, to buying out each other.
That the relationship between Todd Boehly — the club’s more high-profile but minority owner — and his partners at Clearlake Capital, which owns the bulk of the team, has broken down can no longer be in question. Each side has spent much of the last week anonymously criticizing the other.
What is missing, though, is an adequate explanation as to why. Boehly seems to believe that Clearlake is signing a few too many players, and was a little hasty this spring in letting go of its coach, Mauricio Pochettino, who is now officially in pursuit of his own American dream/a quarterfinal exit to Spain in the 2026 World Cup. Clearlake, meanwhile, seems to have decided it does not have much truck with Boehly’s vision for the club.
Neither of these explanations, though, seem like reason enough for either side to be willing to walk away from their share of an investment worth somewhere in the region of $4 billion. Surely, with that much money at stake, you try to make it work for as long as you can?
It is difficult, then, not to think that this is all about power and status: Both Clearlake and Boehly want to do things their way, to have complete control, and they do not particularly like having to share the limelight with someone else.
The post Robert Lewandowski on Fame, Frailty and the One Voice He Won’t Ignore appeared first on New York Times.