It’s been just under a year since Robert Lewandowski left Bavaria for the beautiful beaches of Barcelona.
Since then, Bayern Munich have had all the roar of a lion without teeth.
The club tried to compensate for the loss of the prolific Polish striker by bringing Sadio Mané in from Liverpool in the hopes that the Kop legend would take some of the goalscoring pressure away from Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting.
While Manés arrival hasn’t necessarily been a failure, he didn’t quite have the impact that was anticipated.
Bayern scored five fewer goals this season than in the previous campaign, won three fewer games and drew three more.
Fortunately, Borussia Dortmund’s failure to win at home on the final day handed the title to Thomas Tuchel’s men, and so their lack of an elite striker wasn’t as glaringly obvious as it would have looked had Dortmund clinched the victory on the last game week.
It has been widely reported in the media that Bayern are on the search for a new striker as well as a centre-back.
The signing of Kim Min-jae is close to being completed, but the German giants are no closer to confirming the signature of a new number ‘9’ to replace Lewandowski, albeit twelve months later.
With that in mind, in this data analysis, we will use xGold to creatively find a new centre-forward for Bayern ahead of next season.
In this analysis, we use data and statistics to pick three players who are similar to Lewandowski that could fill in the blank up top.
Robert Lewandowski final season at the Allianz Arena
A huge disclaimer must be put out before we proceed with this analysis piece.
Unless Bayern sign obvious candidates such as Harry Kane, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland or Victor Osimhen, nobody will hit the goalscoring heights of Lewandowski.
The four players listed above are all highly unlikely to move the Bundesliga champions, apart from perhaps Osimhen, and so potentially no candidate selected will reach the heights of consecutively hitting 30 to 40 goals per season.
In fact, in Lewandowski’s final season with Bayern, he scored 35 goals in the Bundesliga, including 30 from non-penalty situations, which is truly incredible for a man who was 33 years old at the time.
Lewandowski even pipped the goal-machine Haaland to the top goalscorer crown by 7 goals and scored fewer penalties too.
The goals have been more spread out this season across the front three, but this isn’t always a good thing necessarily, especially considering that there were no forwards who stepped up in massive games for Bayern in the Bundesliga or in Europe.
