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The contest for the Golden Boot trophy is intensifying as the 2025-26 season passes its halfway mark.

With a new winner in every one of the last three campaigns, the award remains up for grabs. Premier League star Erling Haaland was the last Premier League-based striker to win the trophy back in 2022-23.

The prodigious Norwegian striker is once again in the running this campaign, but encounters stiff competition from Bayern Munich forward Harry Kane and Spanish La Liga superstar Kylian Mbappe. With many games remaining, other talents still have time to enter the fray.

Understanding the European Golden Shoe Award?

The European Golden Shoe was introduced in the 1967-68 season by the French newspaper L'Equipe to recognize the top goalscorer in league matches from a European top-flight league.

Since the 1997-98, the award has been overseen by European Sports Media, which implemented a weighted scoring system. Under this format, a player's goals are weighted with a designated coefficient based on the UEFA coefficient of their domestic competition.

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

For leagues ranked from sixth to twenty-second in UEFA's rankings, such as the Portuguese Primeira Liga, goals are worth 1.5 points. Goals in all other European leagues are worth one point.

While the award has been shared on multiple occasions 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 tiebreaker is the number of assists, followed by the least goals from the penalty spot. Only if these criteria are exhausted would the award be split.

Who are the Primary Contenders?

As it stands, a three-way tussle is underway for the 2025-26 Golden Shoe, with the three previous winners split by just a solitary goal.

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

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

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

The rest of the top 10 is made up of players from leagues that function on a calendar year schedule.

A Look at Previous Winners

Throughout its 59-year history, the Golden Shoe has been claimed by some of football's most iconic legends.

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

Argentine maestro Lionel Messi has secured the record number of Golden Shoes, claiming the honor on six occasions during his 17-year tenure at Barcelona.

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

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

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

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

Erling Haaland scooped 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 identical goal tally for Bayern Munich the following year.

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

Now, the very three players are vying at the summit of the leaderboard again this season, with Kane presently leading the pack.