Every Golden Boot winner in FIFA World Cup history
With the 2022 FIFA World Cup on the horizon, we have looked at the list of players who have particularly stood out at previous tournaments by being crowed the Golden Boot winner.
Below lists all previous winners of the prestigious award as well as the highest-scorers in each tournament prior to 1978 when the away was first introduced:
England’s Harry Kane claimed the award at the 2018 FIFA World Cup, landing the prize with six goals which was two more than his nearest competitor (France’s Antoine Griezmann). Since the introduction of the Golden Boot, only the legendary Ronaldo had scored more goals than Kane’s tally with the Brazilian notching eight in a remarkable campaign back in 2002 when he set the world alight but that record was matched by Kylian Mbappe in Qatar. Mbappe scored his sixth, seventh and eighth goals of the tournament in France’s loss in the final to Argentina but the 23-year-old still made history with his hat-trick with no player scoring more goals in a single FWC.
Miroslav Klose (Germany) also features on this list with his hat-trick against Saudi Arabia in 2002 contributing to his tally of 16 World Cup goals, making him the highest-scorer in World Cup history.
Prior to 1978, the goals seemed to flow a lot more with Just Fontaine (France) scoring an incredible 13 times a the 1958 World Cup. Sandor Kocsis (Hungary) scored 11 in 1954, Gerd Mueller (Germany FR) notched 10 in 1970 while Eusebio (Portugal) found the back of the net nine times in 1966 with all of those surpassing Ronaldo’s total.
