SERGIO AGUERO already has as many goals this season as the Premier League Golden Boot winners managed in the barren years of 1997-98 and 1998-99, when no-one scored more than 18 and the award had to be sullenly shared three ways.
20 years later, in what is on course to be the highest scoring season yet in the reconstituted top-flight, there are six players who can realistically aim for 20 goals, something that has not happened since teams played 42 games a season back in the early 1990s.
The sextuplet contains the three current Premier League players to have won the Golden Boot (Aguero, Harry Kane x2 and Mohamed Salah) and while they have to be among the favourites for the title, there are reasons anyone below could win it, so let’s take a closer look.
Aguero’s Surge
Imagine being a great goalscorer playing for a team who score a lot of goals. Congratulations, you’ve just auto-envisaged Sergio Aguero, who currently leads the Premier League goalscoring chart, has this season equalled Alan Shearer’s all-time record of 11 hat-tricks, and who plays for a Manchester City team who have already scored 61 goals in all competitions in 2019.
Reminder: it’s mid-March. Aguero ticks all of the boxes here: his goal total is above his Expected Goals (because, guess what, he’s an elite finisher), he converts more than one in two of his big chances and he takes and scores penalties yet is not overly reliant on them. Is it a surprise that the top scoring Premier League player in the 2010s has only won the Golden Boot once? Well if you consider that Wayne Rooney scored over 200 Premier League goals and didn’t win it, perhaps not.
Gift horse
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has scored 27 goals in 42 Premier League appearances for Arsenal. Know this: he’s been an unqualified success since moving to the club last year. Even so, that goal total could be even higher, most obviously by one after his squandered penalty away at Tottenham, but there have been plenty of others too.
Aubameyang has, by some distance, the highest Expected Goals figure of any Premier League player this season and his big chance conversion rate of only 35% points to a man who has wasted some huge opportunities, like, say, that open goal at Anfield in December. Arsenal’s pleasant run-in means the chances will keep coming for the 2016-17 Bundesliga Golden Boot winner, but will he take them?
Gold Digger
For a lot of the players in contention you feel that the Golden Boot would be a nice addition to their palmarès but ultimately just an ornament. Harry Kane, though, seems like a player who draws strength and power from the very concept of the Golden Boot and already has a pair in the Premier League and the shiniest boot of all, the World Cup Golden Shoe.
Kane has got his customary ankle injury out of the way and when he smells a chance of topping the chart, the Tottenham man goes into overdrive. In May 2017 Kane scored eight goals in three games (including seven away from home in the space of four days, as many as Dimitar Berbatov or Fernando Torres ever managed in an entire season) to overtake Everton’s Romelu Lukaku, and who’s to say he won’t unleash the same heavy duty firepower two years on?
1⃣8⃣ Aguero
1⃣7⃣ Salah, Kane, AubameyangWho you backing to finish Premier League top scorer? #MCFC #LFC #THFC #AFC
— Unibet (@unibet) March 10, 2019
Man(e) of the Coast
Fresh from scoring twice in midweek to knock Bayern out of the Champions League, Liverpool’s Sadio Mane is the player who seems to have momentum on his side. Eight Premier League goals in 2019 (second only to Aguero) and the chance to face Fulham’s defence on a weekend when many of the other contenders are either resting or playing in the FA Cup, means that Mane could make a big statement in London.
His total of 16 goals this season is considerably higher than his xG of 10.8 which may mean that we are coming towards the end of a productive but finite streak, or that he has powered up to a new, deadlier, level. Goals at Fulham would also go a long way to proving that Mane can do the business away from the English coast (as it stands 80% of his Premier League goals have come within two nautical miles of the nation’s coastline), although geo-pedants will point out that the Thames is tidal upstream of Craven Cottage so any strikes on Sunday should actually be added to his celebrated shoreline tally.
Any Other Business
Reigning Mohamed Salah’s ‘bad’ season sees him just one off Aguero and with the second highest Expected Goals rate in the entire division. Raheem Sterling has the best big chance conversion rate of any player challenging for the Golden Boot and just keeps on getting, and converting, close range chances (more than any other player in the last two seasons).
Another man in form is Romelu Lukaku who once won a Golden Boot in Belgium in 2010 as a 16/17 year old (good) but with one of the lowest ever totals (15 goals, less good). And what about Jamie Vardy? Five goals in four and a bit games since he came on at Wembley in February and someone who was the top scorer in the National League in 2011-12, the same season Sergio Aguero scored his final league goal of the campaign in injury time against QPR. We’ve all got stories.
