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The contest for the Golden Boot trophy is heating up as the 2025-26 season nears its halfway mark.

With a different winner in each of the previous three campaigns, the prize remains highly contested. Manchester City star Erling Haaland was the most recent Premier League-based player to secure the trophy back in 2022-23.

The prolific Norwegian goal-scorer is once again in the running this term, but encounters stiff competition from German Bundesliga forward Harry Kane and Spanish La Liga phenomenon Kylian Mbappe. With many games left to play, other players still have an opportunity to enter the contest.

Understanding the European Golden Shoe Award?

The Golden Boot award was introduced in the 1967-68 season by the French newspaper L'Equipe to celebrate the highest scorer in league matches from a European top-flight league.

Since the 1997-98 season, the award has been administered by European Sports Media, which introduced a weighted scoring system. Under this method, a player's tallies are weighted with a specific coefficient based on the UEFA coefficient of their league.

Goals scored in Europe's five major leagues—the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, and French Ligue 1—are valued at two points each.

For leagues ranked from sixth to twenty-second in UEFA rankings, such as the Portuguese league, goals are worth one and a half points. Goals in lower-ranked European leagues are worth one point.

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

If the tie persists, the subsequent deciding factor is the total of assists, followed by the fewest goals from the penalty spot. Only if these tiebreakers are used would the award be shared.

Identifying the Primary Challengers?

Currently, a three-horse race is underway for the 2025-26 Golden Shoe, with the trio of previous winners separated by just a single goal.

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

In fourth place is Darko Lemajic of Latvian club RFS, who has scored 28 goals (28 points) across their 36 league games in 2025.

Dutch side Feyenoord forward Ayase Ueda is tied for fifth with 18 goals (27 points) from 17 Eredivisie matches this season.

The rest of the current top ten is made up of players from leagues that operate on a January-to-December schedule.

A Look at Previous Winners

Throughout its 59-year history, the Golden Shoe has been awarded to some of football's biggest names.

Portuguese icon Eusebio claimed the inaugural trophy in 1968, scoring 42 goals for Benfica. He later secured the award for a second time in the 1972-73 season.

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

Messi set the benchmark for highest tally in a single season with fifty in 2011-12 (100 points). He also became the only player to date to win it in three successive seasons from 2016-17 to 2018-19.

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

The inaugural player to win the award while at an English club was Ian Rush in 1983-84, when he scored 32 goals for Liverpool.

The prize has seen a different winner in each of the last three seasons.

Erling Haaland claimed the award for the first time in 2022-23, scoring a Premier League record-equaling 36 goals (72 points). Harry Kane earned his maiden Golden Shoe with the same total for Bayern Munich the following year.

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

Now, the very three players are competing at the summit of the leaderboard once more this season, with Kane currently out in front the pack.