Barcelona striker Robert Lewandowski has been left with egg on his face, with some of his first comments after joining the club backfiring brutally this week. For the second successive season, Barcelona have been dumped out of the Champions League in the group stage.
On Wednesday, Inter Milan’s comfortable 4-0 win against Viktoria Plzen was enough to confirm their spot in the last 16 at Barcelona’s expense. And later in the evening, Bayern Munich rubbed salt in the wounds with a 3-0 triumph at the Nou Camp, their sixth consecutive win against Barca by an aggregate score of 24-4.
After Lewandowski ditched Bayern in a £42.5million deal in the summer, the 34-year-old insisted Barcelona were in for a positive season amid a flurry of exciting transfer activity. However, Lewandowski has been condemned to Europa League football while Bayern topped their group again and look like genuine Champions League contenders.
He said: “Barcelona had problems last season. But the club has incredible potential and has made good transfers now. I think the club is on the right track – back to the top. My goal is very clear to get up there with Barca and win trophies!”
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Barca will be shocked by their failure to qualify for the knockout stages after triggering several economic levers to bolster Xavi Hernandez’s squad. But Lewandowski, Franck Kessie, Raphinha and Co. couldn’t save the Blaugrana from another dismal European campaign, something that had become alien to the former during his time at Bayern.
Barcelona, once considered one of the competitions leading contenders. suffered the same fate last season, finishing third in Group E behind winners Bayern and Benfica and dropping into the Europa League. They reached the quarter-finals before falling to a 4-3 aggregate defeat to eventual champions Eintracht Frankfurt.
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Only Kylian Mbappe and Mohamed Salah (both six) have bettered Lewandowski’s five-goal tally in the Champions League group stage this term. But after next week’s dead-rubber trip to Viktoria Plzen, the prolific Pole won’t get another chance to extend his total this season.
Lewandowski is bound to regret his confident comments after signing for Barcelona, unaware of the humiliating early exit to come. He’ll likely view the Europa League as a new opportunity for silverware, though, joining the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo in what is shaping up to be a star-studded knockouts line-up.
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