Robert Lewandowski has claimed the Barcelona hierarchy asked him to stop scoring goals at the tail end of the 2022-23 season, in order to avoid paying a transfer bonus to Bayern Munich.<\/p>\n
Lewandowski joined the Catalan giants from Bayern in a deal reportedly worth \u20ac45m plus add-ons in July 2022, after eight hugely successful seasons with Bayern.<\/p>\n
He hit 23 goals in 34 appearances in LaLiga in his debut campaign with Barca, as they won their first league title since Lionel Messi’s 2021 departure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lewandowski’s arrival came at a time when Barca were going through major financial turmoil, with club president Joan Laporta pulling various financial “levers” to avoid falling foul of LaLiga’s salary cap rules.<\/p>\n
And Lewandowski has now extraordinarily claimed he was told to be less prolific near the end of his debut campaign, so the club could save money on performance-related add-ons.<\/p>\n
“I don’t really want to talk about it. I have too much respect for Barcelona and for the people who work there,” Lewandowski told Radio Zet in Poland.<\/p>\n
“I was aware of the situation the club was in. There were many other situations where you had to sacrifice something personally for the good of the club.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“In short, it was about a bonus that would have to be paid depending on the number of goals I scored. And at that time, Barcelona were looking for every single euro.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The bonus wasn’t a small amount. For me personally, it wouldn’t have changed anything, so I didn’t really have a problem with it.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked if he heeded the request, Lewandowski said: “Well\u2026 it stays in your head.<\/p>\n
“It stays there, even if it’s just a small percentage, but it was enough that once I actually hesitated whether to score a goal or not.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“And at the highest level of football, that’s enough. Sometimes that 5%, even 3%, can decide whether you win or whether you score.”<\/p>\n
Lewandowski has eight goals in LaLiga so far this season, with Hansi Flick’s team boasting a four-point lead over Real Madrid at the summit after 18 matchdays.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Lewandowski has claimed the Barcelona hierarchy asked him to stop scoring goals at the tail end of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-376704","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-soccer","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}