🔗 Share this article

The battle for the Golden Boot trophy is reaching a fever pitch as the 2025-26 season nears its mid-season juncture.

With a new winner in each of the last three campaigns, the award remains highly contested. Premier League star Erling Haaland was the most recent Premier League-based player to secure the award back in 2022-23.

The prolific Norwegian goal-scorer is once again in the hunt this season, but faces formidable competition from Bayern Munich forward Harry Kane and Spanish La Liga phenomenon Kylian Mbappe. With plenty of matches left to play, other players still have an opportunity to enter the fray.

What is the European Golden Shoe Award?

The Golden Boot award was introduced in the 1967-68 by the France-based newspaper L'Equipe to honor the leading goalscorer in domestic league matches from a European top-flight league.

Since the 1997-98, the prize has been administered by European Sports Media, which introduced a weighted points system. Under this format, a player's tallies are weighted with a designated coefficient based on the UEFA coefficient of their league.

Goals scored in the continent's top five leagues—the Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, and French Ligue 1—are worth two points apiece.

For competitions ranked sixth to 22nd in UEFA's list, such as the Portuguese league, goals are worth one and a half points. Goals in all other European leagues carry one point.

While the honor has been jointly won on multiple instances in the past, a regulation update from the 2019-20 season states that in the event of a tie, the award goes to the player with the fewest minutes played.

If the deadlock persists, the next deciding factor is the number of league assists, followed by the least penalties scored. Only if these tiebreakers are used would the award be shared.

Who are the Primary Challengers?

At present, a three-horse battle exists for the current season's Golden Shoe, with the three previous winners split by just a solitary goal.

• Harry Kane (English captain) leads with 19 goals (38 points) from 15 Bundesliga games.
• Erling Haaland also has 19 goals (38 points) from 17 Premier League outings.
• Kylian Mbappe sits just behind on 18 goals (36 points) in 18 La Liga games.

In fourth is RFS striker Darko Lemajic of Latvian side RFS, who has netted 28 goals (28 points) across the club's 36 league games in 2025.

Feyenoord striker Ayase Ueda is joint-fifth with 18 goals (27 points) from 17 Eredivisie fixtures this term.

The rest of the top 10 is comprised of players from leagues that function on a January-to-December schedule.

Reviewing Past Winners

Throughout its nearly six-decade existence, the Golden Shoe has been won by some of football's biggest legends.

Portuguese legend Eusebio won the first-ever trophy in 1968, scoring forty-two goals for Benfica. He later won the award for a second time in the 1972-73 season.

Argentine legend Lionel Messi has secured the most Golden Shoes, claiming the award on six separate times during his long spell at FC Barcelona.

Messi set the benchmark for most goals in a single season with fifty in 2011-12 (100 points). He also became the first and only player to date to win it in three successive seasons from 2016 to 2019.

Portuguese megastar Cristiano Ronaldo first won award in the 2007-08 season with Man Utd before proceeding to win it on three further occasions with Real Madrid.

The first player to win the award while at an English club was Liverpool's Ian Rush in 1983-84, when he netted 32 goals for Liverpool FC.

The award has seen a new winner in every one of the last three seasons.

Erling Haaland won the prize for the first time in 2022-23, scoring a Premier League record thirty-six goals (72 points). Harry Kane secured his maiden Golden Shoe with the same goal tally for Bayern Munich the next year.

Kylian Mbappe is the reigning winner of the award after scoring 31 goals (62 points) for Real Madrid in 2024-25.

Now, the same trio are vying at the top of the leaderboard again this campaign, with Kane presently out in front the way.