“I spoke to him like a father”

Robert Lewandowski made his international breakthrough at BVB. In an interview with ESPN the FC Barcelona striker now spoke about the fact that a conversation with Jürgen Klopp got his career rolling.

“It was my first season, maybe the beginning of my second season in Dortmund. I wasn’t in good shape, I didn’t score that many goals. I didn’t know what Jürgen wanted from me,” recalled the Polish international.

Lewandowski continued: “After a game we lost, I went straight to him. It was maybe midnight at the hotel. I said, ‘I want to talk to you because I don’t understand and I don’t know what you want from me ‘what you expect of me.’ I thought we might only talk for five or 10 minutes, but we talked for an hour and a half.”

Klopp then explained in detail what he would expect from him. But he also gave the striker tips on an emotional level: “The most important thing was that I spoke to him, maybe like a father. And I missed my father because I lost my father when I was 16 years old. Maybe I haven’t been able to find anyone since then who could talk to me like that,” Lewandowski said.

The conversation with the BVB coach at the time would have given him a huge boost. “Three days later we were playing in the Bundesliga and I scored a hat-trick and had an assist and we won 4-0. That was in Augsburg, I think. At that moment I understood that the mentality and what you do in my head are so important, because I haven’t changed anything. But I felt a certain freedom, just like I’m clear in my head. After that, everything changed.”

Lewandowski was under contract with BVB between 2010 and 2014. In 187 games for Dortmund he scored 103 goals and 42 assists. He then moved to Bayern Munich on a free transfer, where he scored 344 goals over eight years. He has been playing for FC Barcelona since last summer.