Robert Lewandowski’s Champions League goals: The numbers behind his century

Robert Lewandowski has become just the third player to score 100 goals in the European Cup/Champions League, after Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

It is, clearly, a hugely impressive achievement and one that puts the Pole in the most esteemed company imaginable.

Lewandowski scored his first goal in the competition as a 23-year-old in October 2011, for Borussia Dortmund against Olympiacos, and, now aged 36, reached 101 with his brace against Brest on Tuesday for Barcelona.

Which club has the former Bayern Munich striker scored against the most often in the Champions League? How many of his goals have come in the knockout phase? Who has provided the most assists for him? And has he got to three figures in fewer games than it took either Ronaldo or Messi?

The Athletic answers all those questions and more in a detailed breakdown of Lewandowski’s century of Champions League goals.

Firstly, here are the 10 top goalscorers in the competition’s history:

Of these men, only Alfredo Di Stefano (0.84) has a better goals-per-game rate than Lewandowski’s 0.81. This means the Polish striker has the best scoring rate in the competition among the eight players to have scored 50 times or more in it.

Lewandowski has played for three clubs in the Champions League, first appearing in the competition for Dortmund in September 2011. He debuted in it for Bayern in September 2014 and for Barcelona in September 2022.

The only time he has won the competition was with Bayern, in 2019-20. He lost in the final as a Dortmund player, to Bayern, in 2012-13.

Here is the number of goals Lewandowski has scored in the Champions League for each of his clubs.

He is one of just two players in the history of the European Cup/Champions League — a tournament which started in 1955 and was rebranded with the latter name in 1992 — to score 10+ goals in it for three different clubs. The other is Ronaldo, who got 21 for Manchester United, 105 in a Real Madrid shirt and 14 with Juventus.

Only three players have scored more goals in the competition for a single club than the 69 Lewandowski registered for Bayern.

He has scored against 37 teams in the competition, with those sides coming from 17 countries.

Four of Lewandowski’s seven goals against Crvena Zvezda (Red Star Belgrade) came in one game in November 2019 for Bayern; a feat he also achieved during his time at Dortmund when, at the age of 24, he stunned Jose Mourinho’s Madrid in a semi-final first leg in April 2013.

As a result, he is one of just five players to score four goals in two different games in the European Cup/Champions League. The other four are: Di Stefano, for Madrid against both Sevilla in January 1958 and Wiener Sport-Club in March 1959, Ferenc Puskas, also for Madrid against both Eintracht Frankfurt in May 1960 and Feyenoord in September 1965, Marco van Basten, for Milan against both Levski Sofia in October 1988 and IFK Gothenburg in November 1992 and Messi, for Barcelona against both Arsenal in April 2010 and Bayer Leverkusen in March 2012 (a night when he scored five times).

The six clubs Lewandowski has played in the Champions League but never scored against are Sevilla, Liverpool, CSKA Moscow (all two games) and Monaco, Celtic and Lokomotiv Moscow (all one game).

The most Champions League goals he has scored in a season is the 15 he netted in 2019-20 — one in which Bayern won the treble, as they also took the Bundesliga title and the DFB-Pokal, Germany’s equivalent of the FA Cup in England. He was, unsurprisingly, the top scorer in the competition that season — that is the only time he has achieved this honour.

Lewandowski scored in every Champions League game he played in during that campaign, except the final. Only Ronaldo (17 in 2013-14 and 16 in 2015-16) has scored more than 15 times in a season in the history of the European Cup/Champions League, though Bayern had two fewer fixtures than was usual for the competition’s winners in 2019-20 because the pandemic led to the quarter-finals and semi-finals being reduced to single-leg ties.

Here is the full breakdown of Lewandowski’s goals by season:

As you can see, he has scored 13 goals or more in a season twice. Ronaldo is the only other player in the European Cup/Champions League to have done it more than once.

Here is every instance of a player scoring 13 goals or more in a season in the competition.

Lewandowski’s 13 goals in 2021-22, when Bayern were knocked out in the quarter-finals, is the only instance on the above list of a player representing a team who didn’t reach at least the semis.

He has scored in 14 consecutive Champions League campaigns, which is comfortably the longest ongoing scoring run by season in the competition. The next graphic shows every player to have netted in at least each of the competition’s past five seasons:

It is worth comparing Lewandowski’s record in the competition with those of the two other players to reach the century mark — Ronaldo and Messi.

Firstly, this is how their respective roads to 100 Champions League goals measure up. (If you click/press/hover over the lines, each player’s total games and goals at that point will appear.)

The Poland captain has reached three figures in just two more games than it took Messi (Lewandowski: 125; Messi: 123) and he has got there an impressive 12 matches faster than Ronaldo did (137). The Portuguese superstar, remarkably, took 27 games to score his first goal in the competition.

Ronaldo scored his 100th Champions League goal, at the age of 32, in April 2017 for Madrid against Bayern and Messi reached his century, aged 30, in March of the following year for Barcelona against Chelsea. Lewandowski, who has reached three figures in the competition at 36, scored for Bayern in that match seven and a half years ago where Ronaldo got to 100.

As mentioned at the start of the article, Lewandowski’s goals-per-game figure in the Champions League is 0.81 — which is marginally superior to both Ronaldo’s (0.77) and Messi’s (0.79). He is the only one of the three still playing in the competition, though, so his rate of scoring will continue to fluctuate while he does so.

Lewandowski is also the only one of the trio to have scored more Champions League goals after turning 30 than before reaching that age.

Lewandowski’s 56 goals in his thirties have come in just 53 games, while Ronaldo’s 68 were scored in 74 matches. Messi’s 35 goals after turning 30 came in 48 appearances. Ronaldo scored his last Champions League goal in November 2021 and Messi’s was the following October.

This is how Lewandowski’s 101 goals break down by round of the competition. Unlike Ronaldo (four goals) and Messi (two), he has never scored in the Champions League final (in his two appearances):

Four of his seven semi-final goals came in the space of 58 minutes against Madrid at Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park in 2013. Overall, 32 of his 101 have come in the knockout rounds.

Breaking his Champions League games down into 15-minute segments, the period where Lewandowski has scored most often is between the 76th and 90th minutes. Though, as you can see from the graphic below, the timing of his goals in the competition is very evenly spread across the matches.

The earliest goal came after four minutes for Dortmund against Marseille in the group stage in December 2013 and the latest is the 92nd-minute goal he scored for Barcelona on Tuesday against Brest.

Next, we have a breakdown of Lewandowski’s goals by body part. The one credited to his back was scored for Bayern against Manchester City in November 2014, when he stooped for a header and connected with the ball just below his neck before it bounced into the net.

None of his 17 Champions League goals for Dortmund were headers but his first goal in the competition after moving to Bayern was one. Since leaving Dortmund, he’s used his head to score 19 of his 84 Champions League goals.

Of the 101 goals, 97 of them have come from inside the box — a figure which includes 17 penalties.

He has only missed from the spot once in the competition, for Bayern against Benfica in November 2021 when Odysseas Vlachodimos guessed the right way to save after Lewandowski’s stuttering run-up. He got a hat-trick in that match, so that penalty save denied him the outright record in the European Cup/Champions League of scoring four goals or more in a single game the most times (he, Di Stefano, Puskas, Van Basten and Messi have all done it twice).

Lewandowski has scored one free kick in the Champions League — a curling effort against Atletico Madrid for Bayern in December 2016 that proved the only goal of the game.

Here are the 39 players to have provided an assist for Lewandowski in the competition. Thomas Muller (a team-mate at Bayern) and Mario Gotze (a colleague at both Dortmund and Bayern) are the only men to have set him up more than three times.

Goalkeeper Manuel Neuer’s assist was a punt up the pitch which Lewandowski capitalised on to complete that hat-trick against Benfica in November 2021.

That Benfica match saw the fourth of Lewandowski’s six hat-tricks in the Champions League. Only Ronaldo and Messi (both eight) have scored more of them in the competition.

But Lewandowski is the only player to score a hat-trick in the Champions League with three different clubs.

The Barcelona forward is now 28 goals behind second-placed Messi on the all-time list of top scorers in the competition. Having turned 36 in August it is unlikely, but by no means impossible, that he will catch the Argentinian. Lewandowski will be helped by the fact the new, expanded format of the Champions League provides more games each season for him to score in. It is highly improbable, however, that he will surpass Ronaldo’s mammoth total of 140.

Who, if anyone, will be the next player to join the competition’s 100 Club? Muller (54 goals), Kylian Mbappe (49), Erling Haaland (46) and Mohamed Salah (45) are the only other men playing in the Champions League this season to have scored more than 40 times in it.

Muller, who is 35, and the 32-year-old Salah are already at ages that mean they probably won’t even get close to three figures, but Madrid’s Mbappe (25) and Manchester City’s Haaland (24) will be confident of getting there — and maybe even of eventually overhauling Ronaldo.

If they do get to 100 Champions League goals, they will be in very good, and highly exclusive, company.

(Top photo: Javier Borrego/Europa Press via Getty Images)