Comparing Lewandowski, Raphinha & Yamal’s stats in 2024-25 to peak Messi-Neymar-Suarez

Barcelona have made an astonishingly good start to the 2024-25 campaign with Raphinha, Lamine Yamal and Robert Lewandowski proving particularly potent in front of goal.

It’s been such a good start to the season, and they’re racking up goals and assists in such quantities, that it’s difficult not to think back to Barcelona’s greatest-ever forward line – Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez.

A decade has passed since that all South American attack combined for the first time, with Suarez joining Neymar and Messi at the Camp Nou in the summer of 2014, having signed for the club for a record €82million fee after flourishing into a world-class player at Liverpool.

Suarez actually missed the first few months of the 2014-15 campaign after being found guilty of biting Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and in his absence Barcelona made a stuttering start.

But once the Uruguayan came into the side, it didn’t take long for him to forge exceptional on-pitch chemistry with Messi and Neymar and the trio never looked back.

That first season together they won the treble, notching 122 goals and 89 assists between them, eventually notching over 600(!) goal contributions across their three full seasons together in Catalonia.

Those stratospheric numbers are unlikely to ever be repeated, but Yamal, Raphinha and Lewandowski are giving it a good go.

The trio, who are 17, 36 and 27 respectively, have made a blinding start to the 2024-25 campaign – capping off their brilliant start to the season by all getting on the scoresheet in Saturday’s statement-making 4-0 victory away to Real Madrid.

That takes their combined tally to 33 goals and 16 assists and we’ve not even got to Halloween.

But how does their output at this fledgeling stage of the campaign compare to Barcelona’s all-time most potent attack?

We’ve crunched the numbers, adding up the total number of games, goals, assists and minutes played by the attacking trios, and put together this comparison – including both MSN’s first season together and their overall numbers across three seasons.

It’s worth taking these statistics with a pinch of salt, given the sample size, but the numbers are striking.

For one, as good as Barcelona’s current front three have been so far this season – they’re still a long way off the insane output of the MSN from 2014-15.

But it’s also worth noting that between them so far this season, Lewandowski, Yamal and Raphinha are scoring at a more frequent rate than Messi, Suarez and Neymar did over the course of their entire time together.