Last season’s top goal-scorer merit in the Champions League was very much an anomaly.
First off, the honour was shared, and that has only previously happened once in the last 25 years of the competition. On this occasion, Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappe blasted eight goals apiece for Bayern Munich and PSG respectively, as they helped their sides reach the semi-finals.
That too incidentally was an oddity, because typically the leading goal-scorer in this tournament fires their team to glory. Or at least that has been the case seven times in the last decade.
Then there was the tally itself that differed from the norm. It was the first time in 14 years when no player in a Champions League campaign managed to rack up double figures.
Champions League Top Scorer Odds:
Does any of this offer any meaningful insight into what’s to come this term? Probably not, as anomalies rarely reveal much by their nature.
That is, unless we focus on the players themselves who topped the list, and not the relatively scant number of times they struck in Europe’s premium contest. Then we’re really starting to get somewhere.
Kane and Mbappe are two of the archest finishers around. Each have won a Golden Boot at a World Cup.
Each have converted 25+ league goals on numerous occasions for their clubs. So of course it was them that ran riot at the expense of the continent’s elite last year.
Indeed, the only surprise was that Erling Haaland – the other global phenom - didn’t join them, the Norwegian finishing top-scorer in 2021 and 2023.
That’s because this is a competition, more than any other, that has little time for underdogs, either collectively or individually. Instead so often we see the cream rise to the top.
It’s there evidenced stark and undeniable on the winners’ list, dating as far back as you wish to go. The last surprise champion in the Champions League this century was Porto, 21 years ago.
Elsewhere the honours roll is entirely populated by Real Madrid, the Milans, Barca and Bayern, along with the giants of English football.
And it’s there too in the leading goal-scorer charts that is wholly inhabited by big game hunters.
Cristiano Ronaldo has led the field seven times, averaging an impressive 12.8 goals across those successful campaigns. Remarkably, the Portuguese great out-fired his peers in the competition for six years running.
Lionel Messi meanwhile has claimed the individual merit six times, bewitching one and all and propelling Blaugrana to four Champions League triumphs.
Beyond this formidable duo we exclusively find feared and prolific hit-men. In 2022, Karim Benzema won the tournament’s Golden Boot and before him there was Robert Lewandowski.
Neymar shared the honour in 2015 with Ronaldo and Messi and going further back there was Andriy Shevchenko, Raul and Ruud Van Nistelrooy.
Among this catalogue of supreme number nines the only Champions League leading goal-scorer in living memory to raise even half an eyebrow is Fernando Morientes, who enjoyed a memorable season on loan at Monaco when les rouges et blank reached the final in 2004.
The former Real Madrid ace is alone in being the only striker in the 2000s to bag an unsurpassed hatful in the tournament despite starting out unfancied in the football odds.
And so we turn to the season to come and it’s prudent to learn from all this, lessons that dispense with any subtlety, making two interlinked details abundantly clear.
The upshot of which is that when it comes to backing a potential leading goal-scorer for this year’s Champions League, go for the big-name forward for a team tipped to go very deep.
This leaves us with a shortlist of three obvious but outstanding candidates.
Kylian Mbappe
The French megastar’s move to Madrid this summer greatly increases his chances of lifting the big-eared trophy, Los Blancos being serial winners of the tournament having won six of the last 11. The best the 25-year-old has previously managed from seven years in Paris is a runner-up appearance 2020.
Not that the generational talent could have done much more for his former club, firing 48 goals in 73 Champions League outings. It’s a haul that includes a hat-trick at Camp Nou as well as goals scored at Anfield and Old Trafford.
Should the five-time Ligue 1 Player of the Year find his gears at the Bernabeu – and there is no reason to suspect that he won’t – it would be folly to think he can’t claim a Champions League Golden Boot for the second year running.
Erling Haaland
Manchester City are rightfully priced up as favourites in the Champions League betting, the perennial English title winners boasting a track record in the tournament bettered only by Real Madrid. The last time they exited prior to the quarter finals was seven years ago.
Moreover, they are spearheaded by a striker who routinely rises to the big occasions, bagging a frankly silly 41 Champions League goals in 39 appearances. It equates to hitting the back of the net every 75 minutes against some of the continent’s finest rearguards.
If Pep Guardiola’s men reach the semis or better in 2024/25 it’s reasonable to anticipate double figures from a player who breaks records for breakfast.
Harry Kane
Kane’s debut season in Germany brought an avalanche of goals, the likes of which the Bundesliga has only witnessed twice before, via Lewandowski most recently and Gerd Muller back in the day.
A bountiful 36 in the league was accompanied by eight in Europe, as FC Hollywood navigated a path to the last four, eventually coming unstuck at the hands of Real.
Another harvest of goals can be expected again but doubts over Vincent Kompany’s credentials in the dug-out puts the England star third in the running to out-fire the rest of the continent. Can, and will, Bayern go deep once more?
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
