Is Lewandowski a better striker than Karim Benzema?

Two consecutive FIFA player of the year winner Robert Lewandowski is widely regarded as one of the best strikers in the world and still at the age of 33 is ageing like a fine wine. On the other hand the prolific striker, Karim Benzema is performing in the best seasons of his career and scoring consecutive hattricks in the Champions League. The French international is highly talented in his field and has been the top scorer in the 2016 UEFA Euros. Both these strikers have been on fire with their statistics so to say. During this season they each scored hat-tricks in the Champions League to help Real Madrid and Bayern Munich progress to the quarter-finals of the competition. So there is definitely a scope for comparison for these two extremely talented strikers and their abilities.

 

Goalscoring Stats:

Goals are the best medium of stats to know the bigger bull in the field. Lewandowski this season has 28 goals and Benzema has 20. So Lewandowski is ahead in terms of goals. But, in terms of expected goals, Lewandowski stands at 30.33 while Benzema stands at 15.92 therefore looking from this perspective Benzema is definitely outperforming his expected goals.

 

Lewandowski is averaging around 4.95 if we see the shots total on average per 90 minutes, and Benzema is averaging at around 3.89 which creates more chances for him.  Coming to the aerial duels, Lewandowski is at 1.81 aerial duels per 90 minutes whereas Benzema is at 0.70. So to see from the finishing perspective Lewandowski stands out as a better goal scorer and finisher than Benzema.

 

Assists and Game Build Up:

Assists and builds up as a whole is an extremely essential trait for all strikers to have. In the case of assists, Lewandowski has only 1 assist while Benzema has 10. Clearly, we know the winner of comparison here, the duo of Benzema and Vinicius is absolutely unbreakable. There are stats for shot-creating actions that show that Lewandowski has 3.3 shot-creating actions per 90 mins but Benzema stands at 3.95 which implies that Benzema is a more creative player with setting up the field along with his teammates and this can be seen in the assists stats results.


Lewandowski has a passing success of 84% whereas Benzema has a success rate of 99% in passing.

These stats portray Karim Benzema as a better build-up player than Lewandowski.

Career Stats:

At the club level, Karim Benzema has played a total of 741 games in which he scored 377 goals and carried out 184 assists with a rate of 0.51 goals per game. While internationally he played 94 games with a total of 36 goals and 20 assists to his name and with a rate of 0.38 goals per game. In a similar manner, if we see the stats of Lewandowski, he has played 666 games in his club career so far with 502 goals and 132 assists with a rate of 0.75 goals per game while playing 120 games at the international level scoring 62 goals with 24 assists and a rate of 0.52.

Lewandowski takes the cake in this category.

Cups and Titles:

Robert Lewandowski is 33 and Karim Benzema is 34.  Lewandowski started his career in 2006 in Znicz Pruszków while Benzema kicked off in 2005 in Lyon. Benzema won 4 Ligue 1 titles during his stay at Lyon while at the Merengue he has won 3 La Liga trophies, 2 Copa del Reys, 2 Spanish Super Cups, and 4 Champions League titles, 3 Super Cups, and 4 Club World Cups. He is also the winner of three La Liga Player of the Month awards.

 

Lewandowski on the other hand won three trophies with Lech Poznan, further helping Dortmund lift four trophies, including two Bundesliga titles. He has won seven Bundesliga trophies with Bayern, besides three DFB-Pokal titles, four DLF Super Cups, one Champions League, one Super Cup, and one FIFA Club World Cup. Moreover, Lewandowski was awarded the FIFA Best Men’s Player in 2020, won the UEFA Men’s Player of the Year in 2019-20 and also bagged the European Golden Shoe in 2020-21. He was the UCL top scorer in 2019-20. He has won two Bundesliga Player of the Season awards winning six Bundesliga top scorer awards and three Goal of the Month awards too.

Is Lewandowski better than Karim Benzema?


Based on the above statistics we can patently say that Lewandowski has emerged as a far more superior striker in terms of goalscoring and experience whereas Benzema is one of the topmost players that without any doubt has the superior striker talent of all time, in comparison loses some points to Lewandowski.

Robert is the top foreign scorer in the history of Bayern Munich, the top foreign scorer in the history of the Bundesliga, the top scorer in Polish history and the only player to have scored a quadruple in the semi-finals of the League of Nations.

Subscribe
Notify of

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments