FIFA World Cup Golden Boot winners: Top goal scorers from each edition
The top scorer at each FIFA World Cup edition wins the Golden Boot. It was known as the Golden Shoe award from 1982 before being rechristened to its current form in 2010.
At every FIFA World Cup, winning the coveted trophy is the goal for every football player.
Football’s biggest global showpiece, however, also offers several individual awards at the end of each edition, providing players an opportunity to etch their names in the history books.
The Golden Ball, for example, is given out to the best player of each FIFA World Cup edition while the Golden Glove goes to the goalkeepers with the most clean sheets. For attacking players, the FIFA World Cup Golden Boot, given to the top scorer of each edition, is the holy grail.
Incidentally, the Golden Boot award at FIFA World Cups only started officially from 1982. It was known as the Golden Shoe award at the time. It came to be known as the Golden Boot, its current iteration, only from 2010.
However, top scorers at previous FIFA World Cup editions are also recognised as Golden Boot winners. The second highest scorer at each football World Cup wins the Silver Boot while the third-highest scorer walks away with the Bronze Boot.
Argentina’s Guillermo Stabile, hence, is the first FIFA World Cup Golden Boot winner, top scoring at the 1930 FIFA World Cup in Uruguay, the inaugural edition, with eight goals.
Until 1994, the FIFA World Cup Golden Boot award could be shared between multiple top scorers.
The first instance the Golden Boot was shared among players was in the 1962 edition held in Chile. Six players – Hungary’s Florian Albert, Soviet Union’s Valentin Ivanov, Brazil’s Garrincha and Vava, Yugoslavia’s Drazan Jerkovic and the host nation’s Leonel Sanchez – finished as joint top-scorers with four goals each.
Starting from the 1994 edition, a tie-breaker system was introduced by FIFA to pick out a definitive winner.
The tie-breaker system stated that if two or more players ended with the same number of goals, the player with more assists wins the award.
However, it didn’t stop Russia’s Oleg Salenko and Bulgaria’s Hristo Stoichkov from sharing the Golden Boot in 1994 as both finished with six goals and one assist.
Oleg Salenko, to date, remains the only FIFA World Cup Golden Boot winner whose team was eliminated in the group stages in the year that saw him win the prestigious award. Five of Salenko’s six goals came in a match against Cameroon and still stands as the record for the most goals scored by any player in a single FIFA World Cup match.
Starting 2006, a new layer was added to the tie-break rule. If players could not be separated after the first two criteria, the one who played the lesser number of minutes would be considered the winner.
The tie-break rule came into play once again after the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa with Germany’s Thomas Muller, Spain’s David Villa, the Netherlands’ Wesley Sneijder and Uruguay’s Diego Forlan all finishing with five goals each.
Thomas Muller won the Golden Boot at that edition, courtesy his three assists. The others had one assist each. David Villa, meanwhile, pipped Wesley Sneijder to the Silver Boot since he had played fewer minutes than the Dutchman.
Just Fontaine of France won the Golden Boot in 1958 and his 13 goals in Sweden remains the most goals scored by a player at a single FIFA World Cup edition. France's Kylian Mbappe is the reigning Golden Boot holder, having netted eight goals in seven matches at Qatar 2022 - one more than Lionel Messi.
No player in football history has ever won the Golden Boot twice.