When FC Barcelona became La Liga champions in the 2022–23 season, Robert Lewandowski won the Golden Boot awarded to the season's top scorer—managing 23 goals. The Polish striker, who joined Xavi's team from Bayern Munich, had two games left to play when Barca had mathematically thumped runners-up Real Madrid to lift their 27th league title. Now, a new story has emerged from that time with the potential to make the Catalans eat humble pie.
The biography "Lewandowski. Prawdziwy" ("Lewandowski. The Real Deal"), written by Sebastian Staszewski, claims that Lewandowski was summoned by the club board with two rounds left to play. The club president Joan Laporta then told the former Bayern Munich star that nobody has ever dared to tell him, or he thought, would never tell him. Laporta categorically asked him not to score again in the remaining fixtures!
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"Robert, we need you to stop scoring goals in the last two games," Marca reported Laporta as telling his ace striker.
The ten-time Bundesliga champion signed for Barcelona in August 2022 and, as per the deal, Laporta's team had to pay a bonus of 2.5 million euros to Bayern Munich if Lewandowski breached the 25-goals mark in LaLiga. FCB were financially struggling back then, even failing to offer sufficient meat and fish dishes to its players, and could not afford to pay the sum to Bayern. Thus, Laporta's board decided to direct Lewandowski to not score any more goals, Marca claimed Staszewski as writing in the book.
Resting the star would have led to media figuring out what was going on, and this must have prompted the club to ask the player to avoid scoring. The top-scorer race was also sealed as second-place Karim Benzema, who finished the season with 19 goals, was well behind Robert. Lewandowski fully featured in the remaining two games of the season without scoring a goal.
