The Premier League Golden Boot is awarded to the player(s) who have scored the most goals in a single season. Here, Ste Tudor looks at five of the greatest winners of the award since the turn of the century...
5) Sergio Aguero
In time of course Erling Haaland will very likely usurp the deadly Argentine, both here and as Manchester City’s most celebrated goal-scoring machine. If the Striking Viking continues his ridiculous ratios, he will usurp everybody.
Presently though, it is Aguero who rules the roost, boasting all manner of Premier League records to boot.
Across ten seasons at the Etihad, City’s all-time record plunderer scored 184 times, his average of a goal every 108 minutes the best by some distance of any player who has made more than 50 top-flight appearances.
Only four forwards (Shearer, Rooney, Kane and Cole) have notched more in the competition’s history, each requiring a greater number of games to top him.
In six of his 10 years terrorising English defences he blasted 20+ league goals, in 2014-15 blasting an unsurpassed 26.
4) Robin Van Persie
Two years prior to Aguero running riot, Van Persie also stuck 26 in a season, some of them worldies but a surprisingly high number of them tap-ins.
For a player known for producing moments of magic from very little, the Dutchman can consider himself criminally under-rated as a six-yard poacher.
The season before that, he went four better, reaching the 30 landmark in a campaign that saw him find the back of the net every 111 minutes.
Three other strikers have won the Golden Boot twice (Drogba, Owen and Hasselbaink) but what sets Van Persie apart is that his twin feats were achieved with two different clubs in consecutive seasons.
His second haul was a major factor in Manchester United winning the title in Sir Alex Ferguson’s final year.
3) Mo Salah
On three separate occasions, the consistently lethal Egyptian has claimed the Golden Boot, twice sharing the honour with others, but that matters not.
What does matter is that none of Liverpool’s remarkable rise under Jurgen Klopp would have been possible without Salah’s explosive excellence down the right, coupled with his vast quantity of goals.
Indeed, is it any wonder the Reds are so strongly backed in the sports betting regardless of opponent when they have such a phenomenally prolific finisher in their ranks?
The fewest number of league goals Salah has scored in a season since joining in 2017 is 19. That’s a figure many others would be delighted with.
2) Harry Kane
In the nine seasons between breaking into Tottenham’s first team and leaving for Bayern last summer for £100m, Kane fired 213 Premier League goals, a tally only bettered by Alan Shearer.
He became Spurs’ all-time record goal-scorer, doing likewise for England, and by striking up a formidable partnership with Son Heung-min, he converted or assisted a staggering 41.4% of his club’s league haul across just shy of a decade.
Naturally enough, such sustained firepower brought a wealth of individual merits, not least three Golden Boots, finishing runner-up three times for good measure.
1) Thierry Henry
Serviced by some of the best Premier League midfielders of all time, the Gallic genius didn’t only top the goalscoring charts in four out of five seasons at the start of this century, but he did so with style to spare. Which explains why he also won the Player of the Year twice-over too.
In a similar vein to Salah, so many of Henry’s goals came from drifting in from out wide and subsequently routine finishes from close range were rare.
Instead, a considerable quantity of his 175 strikes from 258 league appearances were sprinkled with panache and inventiveness, a joy to behold.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
