European Golden Shoe 2024/25: Mbappe hopes Real Madrid move leads to first title

Carlo Garganese

• Updated: 27 Jun 2024 10:49 BST
• 6 min read

The European Golden Shoe award is up for grabs in the 2024/25 season and defending champion Harry Kane faces a tough task to retain his title.

Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappe are among the continent’s elite strikers who are expected to make a fierce challenge to Kane as they also bid to win the European golden boot.

Kane won his first European Golden Shoe title last season, scoring 36 times in a stunning debut campaign for Bayern Munich, albeit one which did not end with the team trophies he craved after leaving Tottenham.

READ MORE: Premier League top scorers 2024/25

That total of 36 goals and 72 Golden Shoe Points was the same as Haaland had posted a year before for Manchester City in the Premier League when the Norway forward won his first Golden Show crown.

Mbappe will like his chances of winning the Golden Shoe race for the first time after moving from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid ahead of this season.

While France star Mbappe is yet to come out on top in the Golden Shoe charts, he has come very close on multiple occasions, scoring at least 27 goals in five of his final six seasons playing for PSG in Ligue 1 and regularly challenging for a podium spot.

That run included a 33-goal season in 2018/19 that saw him finish just three short of Lionel Messi, which was the last time the Argentina great triumphed during his stunning career at Barcelona.

As Real Madrid's new leading light, Mbappe will now hope to score the most goals in Europe for 2024/25, although team-mate Jude Bellingham and Barca’s Robert Lewandowski will be among a host of other top contenders.

European Golden Shoe Standings

This page will be updated throughout the 2024/25 season with regular updates on the European Golden Shoe standings.

For the time being our table below tracking the European Golden Shoe standings will only list players from the top five European leagues, where the winner is most likely to emerge from.

Players from outside the top-five leagues in Europe are eligible to win the Golden Shoe, but the winner has not come from one of those divisions since 2002.

Who will score the most goals in Europe’s top five leagues this season? Kane, Mbappe and Haaland start the campaign as three of the more likely contenders, but there have been surprise winners in the past, including Lazio’s Ciro Immobile in 2019/20.

Who won the European Golden Shoe - Previous Winners

Lionel Messi has won the most European Golden Shoe titles. The Inter Miami forward has triumphed on six occasions.

Messi's last success was in 2018/19 for Barcelona and he did not win the award during either of his two years with PSG.

Cristiano Ronaldo is his closest challenger with four career wins, though the Al-Nassr attacker has not come out on top since 2014/15 when he was at Real Madrid, with his second spell at Manchester United not hitting the heights of his first.

Robert Lewandowski’s triumph in 2021/22 means there are 10 players who have two Golden Shoe awards each, a list that also includes Luis Suarez and Thierry Henry.

Messi holds the record for most goals and points in a season as well. He remarkably scored 50 goals in 2011/12, earning himself 100 points.

Ronaldo has come closest to breaking that, scoring 48 goals for 96 Golden Shoe points when he last won the crown in 2014/15.

Argentina forward Messi is the only player in European Golden Shoe history to win the title three years in a row, doing so from 2016/17 until 2018/19. Lewandowski is the last to win it back-to-back.

Ronaldo, though, is one of only four players to have won the title with different clubs. The others to have achieved that feat are Luis Suarez, Diego Forlan and Mario Jardel.

Lewandowski became the first Bundesliga winner since 1972 with the first of his two triumphs in the 2020/21 season, with his remarkable 41 goals from 29 games for Bayern being the best goal tally since 2015.

That came after Ciro Immobile won the 2019/20 European Golden Shoe, scoring 36 goals for Lazio in a tremendous Serie A season.

It was Immobile's first title, with the striker becoming the first Serie A player to have the most goals in Europe since Francesco Totti triumphed for Lazio's rivals Roma in 2006/07.

Ligue 1 has not produced a winner since Josip Skoblar in 1971.

France's top flight might have expected to win multiple Golden Shoe titles in the modern era given the likes of Messi, Mbappe and Zlatan Ibrahimovic have played in the league, but the competition looks likely to have to wait a while longer for one of its players to be crowned, particularly with Mbappe now heading to Spain..

Success for Erling Haaland in 2022/23 gave the Norway star his first European Golden Boot title.

Haaland was the first Premier League winner since Suarez achieved the feat with Liverpool in 2013/14.

Harry Kane dethroned Haaland last season, meaning a Bayern player has impressively won the award in three of the last four campaigns.

What are the European Golden Shoe rules and weightings?

Only league goals are eligible for points in the European Golden Shoe award.

Each strike earns points in a weighted system depending on the quality of league.

The five elite leagues - Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 - all carry a weighting of 2, meaning that a player will be awarded two points for every goal they score in these competitions.

For the leagues ranked sixth to 21 in Uefa's coefficients rankings - which includes the top-flights in Portugal and Netherlands - goals scored are given a weighting of 1.5, and goals scored in a league outside the top 21 are given a weighting of 1.

That was not always the case in the European Golden Shoe. From 1968 until 1991, the award simply went to the highest goalscorer on the continent, regardless of the strength of league.

Awards were not initially handed out between 1991 until 1996, when the new system came into force. Since then, only two players playing outside what were the five highest-ranked leagues at the time have ever won the Golden Shoe - Henrik Larsson (2000/01) and Mario Jardel (2001/02).

The Golden Shoe has been tied in the past, most recently when Suarez and Ronaldo shared the honour in 2013/14. Going forward, though, the award will be given to the player who has played the fewest minutes if two of them end up on the same number of points.

This page covers the 2024/25 European Golden Shoe race. All the details from the 2023/24 season can be found here.