You don’t have to take footballer elections too seriously if you don’t want to become a world footballer yourself. But it is also true that such elections were not only an issue in today’s event sport, which is geared towards heroes, but also in the past. In 1970, for example, an international award was given to a player from the Bundesliga for the first time. Gerd Müller won the Ballon d’Or for Europe’s Footballer of the Year. When a Hungarian functionary “polemicized” against this election, as Müller’s biographer Hans Woller writes, he considered the winner to be just a dust-off and a mediocre player.
The commemoration of Gerd Müller was also the focus of this year’s “The Best” free program organized by the world association Fifa. A video of his goals was shown to mark his death last year. When Robert Lewandowski accepted his best trophy, he was asked about Müller. “Unfortunately, Gerd is no longer with us. But I wouldn’t have made it without him,” he said. According to the FC Bayern striker, without Müller there would have been no 40-goal record that he could have surpassed with 41 goals this season in the Bundesliga. “It’s always about the next step to achieve the next goals.”
Robert Lewandowski, 33, is now a FIFA World Player honored for the second time in a row, chosen by the captains and coaches of all national teams as well as selected journalists and fans. However, he did not win the more traditional Ballon d’Or, in which only journalists vote and which is more about image, in November, when he finished second behind Lionel Messi. There were actually people who found it a bit scandalous at the time, and there were also a few polemics. And now? The only upset was that second-placed Messi didn’t give his opponent Lewandowski any of his three possible votes. Otherwise there was a lot of agreement. Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki even said: “Probably nobody thought for a second that things could turn out differently.”
The first title was also a milestone for FC Bayern, the second is a personal distinction
Lewandowski’s first world footballer’s title was still a historic milestone in his biography, for years he had worked to match the permanent winners Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, with even more goals, scored in every possible way. It drove him, and it made Bayern even more successful, which in turn was an argument for Lewandowski’s private triumph. The second world footballer title is now mainly the assessment of his personal performance: 58 competitive goals in the calendar year, statistically one every 69 minutes.
However, it seems unlikely that the public’s view of Lewandowski will change. Unlike Messi, who is associated with spectacle, the Pole remains more of a machine-like assembly line goalscorer. “The personified perpetuum mobile of scoring goals” is what Bayern President Herbert Hainer called him, which is only imprecise insofar as a perpetuum mobile keeps moving by itself; Lewandowski does this with additional training and nutritional optimization.
He continues to get to know his body, he said at a press conference on Tuesday. It didn’t sound like he’d ever think about quitting. Lewandowski, under contract with FC Bayern until 2023 and in the form of his life, will also take the 2022 footballer elections seriously again.