The Golden Boot is an award given to the top scorer in an English Premier League season, at the end of it. The first player to reach 10, 20 and 30 goals in a season is also awarded the Golden Boot.
Who will win the Golden Boot in the current season? In the opening week of the Premiership, there have been several goalscorers, including Manchester United's Rooney, and Liverpool's Suarez, among others from Bolton, Blackburn, Wolves, Wigan, Norwich, and West Brom.
In the last season (2010-11) the award was won jointly by Dimitar Berbatov playing for Manchester United and Carlos Tevez playing for Manchester City. Both scored 20 goals; Berbatov played 32 games to achieve the feat, while Tevez took one game fewer.
The record for the most goals in a Premier league season is 42, jointly held by Andrew Cole and Alan Shearer. However, this record was achieved in a 42-game season. (This was before the the 1995-96 season when the number of teams was reduced from 22 to 20.)
Currently, the Premier League is played in a 38-game season, and the record for this length is 31 goals, achieved by Alan Shearer and Cristiano Ronaldo. The most Golden Boots won has been four, by Theirry Henry, while playing for Arsenal. Shearer won the award thrice, playing fro Blackburn and Newcastle.
In the 1997-98 and 1998-99 seasons, three players won the award scoring 18 goals apiece. apart from those two seasons and the last season, when Berbatov and Tevez won it jointly, in all the other seasons, there has only been a single winner of the Golden Boot.
Apart from Theirry Henry and Alan Shearer, three others have won the award more than once, the others being Didier Drogba, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Michael Owen, all of whom won it twice each. Hasselbaink, like Shearer, was the only other player to win it with two clubs.
In 19 seasons, the winner of the Golden Boot has been associated with the title winners on only 9 occasions giving the lie to the assumption that the highest scorer must necessarily belong to the champion team.
The last English player to win the award was Kevin Phillips in 1999-2000, while the first foreign player to win it solely was Holland's Hasselbaink in 2000-01; he had earlier shared it with Dwight Yorke of Trinidad and Tobago in 1998-99.
France and Holland have had more than one winner, among players from six countries other than England to have won the Golden Boot. While Alan Shearer took all of 42 games to win it in the 1994-95 season, Michael Owen played just 30 games in Liverpool's 1998-99 season to score 18 goals and make the Golden Boot his own. The highest strike rate for a Golden Boot winner was set by Cristiano Ronaldo when he scored 31 goals in 34 games, during the 2007-08 in which his team Manchester united won the Premiership.
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Suresh Iyer is an avid sports fan and blogger.
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