We took this feature, which was clearly inspired by Cole Palmer, to say that while certainly his winning the Golden Boot award would be a shockingly unlikely event, in the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t be too far off. I started with the idea of showing.
We then tried to find five other unlikely Golden Boot winners…and had a tough time. I was sure there would be some bad guy Marcus Stewart or James Beatty in here somewhere, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.
Palmer is currently level with Erling Haaland on 20 goals and it would be really impressive if he could do that – just three weeks ago he was still considered an outsider ranked 150/1. Palmer He is. Not Haaland.We all know by now that he’s a fraud, but he’s not that Mostly one.
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Dion Dublin of Coventry City (1997/98)
What fascinates us most about Dion Dublin these days is that the guy who made his career in pro football is now much more comfortable presenting a TV show about housing than commentating on pro football. It means that you are skilled at it.
But what fascinated us all those years ago is that a man who had never in his life scored 20 goals in a season in the top flight could still score 20 goals in a season in the Premier League (with at least a third of them) is the proud owner of (alongside Chris Sutton) and a very young, pre-Argentine Michael Owen) who scored 18 goals for Coventry in 1997/98.
Kevin Phillips of Sunderland (1999/2000)
Really, there’s only one other winner who has no chance of matching Palmer. This may be Palmer’s first taste of Premier League football, having looked to break out at City before moving to Chelsea, but Phillips had never played at the highest level before having the best season of his life. There wasn’t.
Sure, he had scored a ton of goals in the previous two years for Sunderland in the First Division, or what a stupid name the Championship was called at the time, but his first Premier League season as half of the famous team His 30-goal season campaign and big combo with Niall Quinn was extraordinary.
Phillips was a great goalscorer, but no one expected him to not only match but exceed his efforts from the previous two seasons at the lower levels.
It feels perfectly right that Phillips never again scored more than 14 goals in a top-flight season, and the nonsense of his Golden Boot-winning season has never been more upbeat and incongruous. Something shines.
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Didier Drogba of Chelsea (2006/07))
Yes, I said it. Context is everything you see. We all know how good Drogba is, but that’s not the point. He was unlikely to become a Golden Boot winner. To oversimplify him, he was a scorer who scored all-important goals, rather than a stat-boosting marauder who tends to scoop up this gong.
The first of his two Premier League Golden Boots was won in his third season at Stamford Bridge, in the 2006/07 season. He had scored 10 and 12 goals in his first two seasons at Chelsea, respectable but professing problems with his boots. Even in that unforgettable Marseille campaign that led to his move to Chelsea, he only managed to score 19 league goals. He saved his best work that season with 11 goals in 16 games for an unlikely Champions League final appearance. Big goals, but not necessarily a lot of goals.
In the 2006-07 season, Drogba reached the 20-goal landmark for the first time in a top-flight season on his fifth attempt. Comically, he only did so in the 2009/10 season when he scored 29 goals to snatch his second Golden Boot. Of the nine Premier League seasons he spent with Chelsea, these were the only two seasons in which he scored more than 12 league goals. The real statistical oddity is that almost half of his 104 Premier League goals for the club, 49 of them, came in the two boot-winning seasons, and just 55 in the remaining seven seasons. is.
He scored more Champions League goals (six) than his five in the Premier League in the 2011-12 season, but to be fair, it all worked out in the end.
Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy (2019/20)
Vardy is certainly not the least likely to succeed in the Premier League during his Leicester career, but he did so in 2015/16, just when age seemed to be catching up with him. He was sacked with his best season since Miracle (when Harry Kane lifted him to Golden). Boots) finished with 23 goals, one goal ahead of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Danny Ings. They definitely would have been more useful for our purposes.
At 33, Vardy became the oldest recipient of the award and his goal brought Leicester, under Brendan Rodgers, close to a return to the Champions League. The highlight was definitely his hat-trick in an absurd 9-0 win at Southampton. This is just one of many amazing moments in one of modern football’s most unlikely and elite careers.
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Son Heung-min to Tottenham (2021/22)
Because of this nature, we obviously need one or two reaches. Basically, there are very few Golden Boot winners that are completely unexpected, so we have to make do with winners that only raise eyebrows.
For example, if you wanted to, you could make a semi-convincing case for Cristiano Ronaldo’s 2007/08 Golden Boot here. Most of his Manchester United career was spent ascending to and descending from the absurd scoring peaks he would achieve and maintain over the course of a decade. is often forgotten. It wasn’t really a peak, was it? Considering that his lowest season goals between leaving United in 2009 and returning in 2021 was with Juventus in 2018/19, when he scored just 21 goals in the league and 28 overall. And the situation on Table Mountain is even more serious. But in fact, he has only scored more than 20 league goals for United once, in the 2007-08 season, when he scored an absurd 31 of his 34 goals.
But we’re going to get Son Heung-min instead. Like Ronaldo, he was not a striker during the season in which he won the Golden Boot. This is a hint to the main reason he got our vote, and even though he’s a total outsider just to be the team’s top scorer, he won the Golden Boot Award. The reason is that we acquired .
However, it would also be completely wrong to say that he won the Golden Boot despite the presence of Harry Kane. He won, more precisely, because Harry Kane was there, often doing creative work as well as scoring goals.
In any case, it was an outstanding goalscoring year for a player who scored consistently for either team that season, but never before or since. Ta. Son has reached double figures in league goals eight times for Spurs, but has only surpassed 17 goals with 23 in 2021/22. There has never been another season in which Kane has had a serious and consistent shot at the award he has won three times. At the same time.
