Lionel Messi: When Barcelona icon's son teased him about Liverpool loss in 2019

Lionel Messi was visibly crushed by Barcelona’s defeat to Liverpool in 2019.

It’s damning that the overriding theme of Messi‘s final years at Camp Nou were devastating Champions League exits with each of his last four seasons ending in exactly that manner.

The Blaugrana threw away a 4-1 lead against AS Roma, were on the receiving end of an 8-2 thrashing by Bayern Munich and were thumped 5-2 on aggregate by Paris Saint-Germain.

However, there’s no denying that the Anfield catastrophe was the worst of the bunch because it was the first moment where it became apparent that Barcelona had a sustained problem on their hands.

That, and the fact that Barcelona – unlike their final two seasons with Messi – had a feasible shot at going all the way with just 90 minutes on Merseyside between them and a clash with Tottenham Hotspur in Madrid.

But alas, we all know what happened next with Divock Origi and Georginio Wijnaldum bagging braces to break Messi’s heart with arguably the greatest Champions League comeback of all time.

In fact, there’s good reason to think that Messi’s Barcelona never truly recovered from the defeat, such was the devastating blow to the club’s mentality while they were still grieving the Roma loss.

And poor old Messi couldn’t even seem to escape the crushing nature of the Liverpool defeat in his own household with the Ballon d’Or winner revealing that his son teased him about the collapse.

During a 2019 interview with TyC Sports, the Argentine icon amusingly revealed that his young son, Mateo, pretended to play as Liverpool simply because they beat him on that famous night at Anfield.

According to the Daily Mail‘s translation, Messi explained: “Mateo loves football, he wears all the shirts. 

“But we played