Lionel Messi: The epic moment Barcelona icon bailed out Luis Suarez in 2017

Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez formed a lethal partnership at Barcelona.

While the iconic ‘MSN’ triumvirate might only have lasted for a handful of seasons, the combination of Messi and Suarez continued to shine for another three years after Neymar’s departure.

And while a gut-wrenching 8-2 defeat to Bayern Munich might have bookended their lucrative collaboration, there’s no denying that they got plenty out of their work together at Camp Nou.

We’d even go as far as to say that Suarez was the closest that Barcelona ever came to finding someone who could go punch for punch, strike for strike with Messi’s extraterrestrial goalscoring.

You really did feel as though at one point during the mid-2010s that the Blaugrana were only a Cristiano Ronaldo away from having the three most prolific goalscorers on the planet.

Besides, it says everything that in the long and prestigious history of Futbol Club Barcelona that Messi and Suarez have delivered the most and third-most goals for the men’s first-team.

And Suarez’s ability to hold his own amongst the Ballon d’Or winners was no better demonstrated than when he beat both Messi and Ronaldo to the 2015/16 European Golden Shoe with a staggering record of 40 La Liga goals in just 35 games.

However, in what is by no means a criticism of Suarez, the reality of the situation is that Messi would always emerge as the greater goalscorer of the two across a longer period of time.

Suarez might be one of the finest centre forwards of the modern era, but he could never quite produce the alien-like numbers that Messi was able to harvest on a season-by-season basis.

And few moments illustrate that point better than the final stages of Barcelona’s 4-2 league win over Eibar on May 21, 2017.

While that