Haaland Chases History: Can He Match the Golden Boot Greats?
Erling Haaland has won the Premier League Golden Boot three times in four seasons. Now he is hunting a fourth — and a share of a record that has stood for years.
The Golden Boot goes to the player who scores the most goals in a Premier League season. Over 34 seasons, 42 awards have been handed out, sometimes shared when two or more players finish level. Only 12 of those 42 winners also lifted the Premier League title in the same campaign, a reminder that the league's top scorer and the league's best team are not always the same thing.
Haaland's latest triumph came at the end of the 2025-26 season, when his 27 goals for Manchester City were enough to claim the award, according to the Premier League. That made it three Golden Boots in four years. He won his first in 2022-23, his second in 2023-24 with 27 goals in 31 games, and then reclaimed the prize last season after narrowly missing out in between.
If Haaland wins again in 2026-27, he will draw level with Mohamed Salah and Thierry Henry on four Golden Boots each. Salah's fourth came relatively recently; Henry's were all won during his Arsenal years, when he was the league's most complete forward. Haaland is 26, in his physical prime, and already on the cusp of joining them.
What makes the record harder to grasp is how different recent seasons have been. No player scored more than 23 goals across the entire league in the four seasons between 2018-19 and 2021-22. Then Haaland arrived and the numbers jumped. Each of the past four Golden Boot winners has finished on between 27 and 36 goals. Haaland has been responsible for three of those.
The Premier League has not always been dominated by out-and-out strikers. Cristiano Ronaldo was the first winger to win the Golden Boot, back in 2007-08, a time when he was reinventing what a wide attacker could be. Since then, the likes of Sadio Mané and Son Heung-min have each claimed a share of the award, proving the route to the top of the scoring charts is not reserved for conventional number nines.
Haaland, though, is as conventional as they come. He stands six feet four, lives in the penalty box, and finishes chances with a relentlessness that borders on mechanical. He scored nine goals in his first seven games of the 2024-25 season, as reported by the BBC — a start that suggested he was on course for another landslide before the season settled.
For fans, the appeal is simple. Individual scoring records give a season a storyline beyond the title race. Haaland chasing Henry and Salah gives every neutral something to track in the final months — a subplot running underneath the main event. Whether he gets there will depend on fitness, on how Manchester City set up under their manager, and on whether anyone else can produce the kind of run that derails him.
The 2026-27 Premier League season begins soon. One number to watch: four.
