Lewandowski is outperforming the best versions of Ronaldo and Messi

Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski is on course to have a better season than Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have ever had in their careers.

The Poland striker's four goal-blitz against Red Star Belgrade this week took his league and Champions League tally to 26 this campaign – in just 17 appearances.

This equates to a goal roughly every 57 minutes, is about seven minutes quicker than Messi's best ever season in La Liga and Europe in 2012-13.

Meanwhile, Cristiano Ronaldo's best minutes-to-goal campaign came in 2013/14, where he scored every 73.6 minutes for Real Madrid that year.

The Poland captain has bettered the feats of two of the greatest players to ever play the game despite being 31 years old - an age which normally implies the slowing down of a footballer's career.

In 2012-13, Messi scored 46 goals in 32 La Liga matches as Barcelona won the league title with 100 points.

The Argentinian also found the net eight times in 11 Champions League matches that year, but the Catalan club went out at the semi-final stage to Bayern Munich in a crushing 7-0 aggregate defeat.

A year later, Real Madrid's Ronaldo also had the best season of his career in terms of minutes per goal, scoring 31 goals in 30 La Liga appearances.

While Madrid finished the league season in third place that year, the Portuguese forward added 17 goals in just 11 Champions League matches to win 'La Decima' for Carlo Ancelotti's side.

And despite there being 24 Bundesliga matches remaining this season, and the knockout stages of the Champions League still to come, Lewandowski is in such lethal form that he is capable of helping Bayern mount a serious challenge for both sets of silverware.

In completing this goalscoring feat, Lewandowski has also joined Messi and Ronaldo in becoming the third player to score 25+ goals in their opening 20 appearances of the season.

The 31-year-old has scored all but one of Bayern Munich's Bundesliga and Champions League games so far this season and has scored more than one goal in seven of the 16 games in which he has scored.

Lewandowski's free-scoring performance in the 6-0 win in Belgrade on Tuesday night was only his second hat-trick of the season, his first coming in a 3-0 win away at Schalke in August.

His rapid quadruple was managed in just under 15 minutes which rivals the striker's 2015 feat when he scored five goals in nine second-half minutes in a 5-1 Bundesliga demolition of Wolfsburg.