Here’s Julia with her article on who is the favourite to win the premier league Golden Boot in 2019/20?
Who is the favourite to win the premier league Golden Boot in 2019/20?
Last seasons Golden Boot was a 3 way tie between Sadio Mane, Mohamed Salah and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. If you were looking for a tie breaker though you’d say Mane, as his 22 goals didn’t involve any penalties.
Lets take a look at who some of the favourites are on sports betting sites for this season
Harry Kane
The 2015/16 and 2016/17 winner lost any chance of repeating his 16/17 end of season heroics to obtain the Golden Boot when he succumbed to another ankle injury. That meant he didn’t feature again after gameweek 32 .
Kane’s not even able to claim a moral victory as Mane and Aubameyang had a better goals to minutes ratio than him.
This season he has a big advantage over his 18/19 season. Firstly, he will get a post season rest and that will be followed by full pre-season to hopefully get him to peak fitness. That will be also an advantage to many of his Spurs team mates where a number played in the latter stages of the World Cup or like Son Heung-min had additional competitions to navigate. This time only Aurier and Sanchez will face such distractions.
However, the potential transfer of Christian Eriksen, who has said he is looking for a new challenge would remove the primary creative influence, with 12 assists last season, from the team. Also has you have to question whether the accumulation of those ankle injuries will allow Kane to play sufficient minutes to challenge for the Golden Boot. We’ve also seen his own game develop where he has tended to drop deeper for the ball and become more of a creative influence himself.
On the reverse side of it the introduction of VAR could help his penalty count, although that influence of VAR still remains to be seen.
Mohamed Salah
The 2017/18 winner with 32 goals found it an unsurprisingly impossible task to replicate that season in 18/19. Although, as I said above, he still managed to get a share of the Golden Boot in the end. However, he was the lowest of the 3 winners in the goals per minute category though.
This season is likely to see go deep into the post Premier League season with Egypt in the African Cup of Nations. This could, potentially, even see him miss the game any Golden Boot chaser would least want to miss, home to newly promoted Norwich in gameweek 1.
On the positive side, the designated penalty taker for Liverpool, James Milner, is another season older and that could see Salah increase his tally of goals through penalties as he is the designated taker when Milner is off the pitch. An occurrence that seems likely to increase this season
Sadio Mane
As I said above, probably the moral victor of the 3 Golden Boot winners as his didn’t involve any penalties. Like Salah though he is likely to go deep into the African Cup of Nations competition, which ends on the 19th of July for the finalists, with Senegal. Depending on any rest needed, at best, that would give him an imperfect pre-season and at worst missing the juicy Norwich home game in gameweek 1.
Another area of concern is that he outscored his expected goals last season by 22 goals to 16.76. While he has a history of being able to do this in some seasons it’s certainly not something he has consistently done and this could be a watchout for next season depending on whether he was clinical or had the rub of the green. Lets not forget the season before he scored only 10 goals, albeit on less minutes.
Other contenders
These are just 3 of the contenders. You can’t forget Sergio Aguero or Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang being involved in the race as well.
