It has happened only twice before.
Blackburn and then Newcastle's Alan Shearer led the Premier League in goals for the three straight seasons from 1994-1997. Nearly 10 years later, Thierry Henry did the same for Arsenal from 2003-2006.
Since Henry, a handful of players have done it two years in a row. Robin van Persie (for Arsenal and Manchester United, 2011-2013), Harry Kane (Tottenham, 2015-2017), and Mohamed Salah (Liverpool, 2017-2019) led the league in consecutive seasons but couldn't get there a third time.
And then there's Manchester City's Erling Haaland. In 2022-23, his first season in the Premier League, he broke the goals record with 36. Last year, he let everyone down, scoring only 27 times and easily winning the Golden Boot again. Haaland has been in the league for only two seasons, and Shearer, Henry, Kane, and Salah are now the only players in league history with more career Golden Boots than the 24-year-old Norway international.
It turns out that when you put the best pure goal scorer in the world on top of Pep Guardiola's possession machine at Manchester City, the results are pretty impressive. So impressive, in fact, that it seems inevitable Haaland will do the thing only the two best strikers in Premier League history have done and win the Golden Boot a third straight time.
Per ESPN BET, Haaland's odds of leading the league in goals come out to minus-150 (implied probability of 60%), while no one else is higher than plus-1000 (9.1%).
While those odds suggest that Haaland is by far the likeliest player to lead the league in goals this season, they also suggest there's a decent chance that someone not named Erling Haaland wins the Golden Boot. Who might that be? And what would have to happen for that to occur?
