While we enjoy high-octane club level action right through the year, the FIFA World Cup comes around once every four years and that’s the chance for football fans to support their favourite players and favourite countries too. And while the defensive line and those preventing goals, and making chances are super important to every team, the ones scoring the goals tend to take away all glory.
It’s these goal scorers that put their countries on the scoreline and that’s how teams end up winning too. FIFA has always felicitated these top goal scorers in every edition since the first tournament which was the 1930 FIFA World Cup, with an award called the FIFA Golden Boot, given away to the top scorer (or scorers) in every World Cup edition.
There’s also something called the Golden / Silver / Bronze Ball awards which go out to the top players in each tournament but the Golden Boot in particular is for the top goal scorer. Sometimes over the FIFA World Cup history, there have been players who have tied for the most goals in a tournament, which saw the award being shared among a few players, including as many as 6 players at the 1962 FIFA World Cup.
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The first ever winner of the FIFA Golden Boot award was Guillermo Stábile from Argentina who went on to score as many as 8 goals in half the number of matches in the 1930 edition, also winning the Silver Ball award that year. We’ve put together a FIFA World Cup Golden Boot winners list from start till date, updated as of 19th November 2022 before the start of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
List of FIFA World Cup Golden Boot winners
| Year | Winner | Country | Goals (Matches) | Other Awards |
| 1930 | Guillermo Stábile | Argentina | 8 (4) | Silver Ball |
| 1934 | Oldřich Nejedlý | Czechoslovakia | 5 (4) | Bronze Ball |
| 1938 | Leônidas | Brazil | 7 (5) | Golden Ball |
| 1950 | Ademir | Brazil | 9 (6) | Bronze Ball |
| 1954 | Sándor Kocsis | Hungary | 11 (5) | Silver Ball |
| 1958 | Just Fontaine | France | 13 (6) | Bronze Ball |
| 1962 | Garrincha / Vavá / Leonel Sánchez / Flórián Albert / Valentin Ivanov / Dražan Jerković | Brazil / Chile / Hungary / Soviet Union / Yugoslavia | 4 goals each | Bronze Ball |
| 1966 | Eusébio | Portugal | 9 (6) | Bronze Ball |
| 1970 | Gerd Müller | West Germany | 10 (6) | Best Young Player, Bronze Ball |
| 1974 | Grzegorz Lato | Poland | 7 (7) | – |
| 1978 | Mario Kempes | Argentina | 6 (7) | Golden Ball |
| 1982 | Paolo Rossi | Italy | 6 (7) | Golden Ball |
| 1986 | Gary Lineker | England | 6 (5) | – |
| 1990 | Salvatore Schillaci | Italy | 6 (7) | Golden Ball |
| 1994 | Hristo Stoichkov / Oleg Salenko | Bulgaria / Russia | 6 goals each | Bronze Ball |
| 1998 | Davor Šuker | Croatia | 6 (7) | Silver Ball |
| 2002 | Ronaldo | Brazil | 8 (7) | Silver Ball |
| 2006 | Miroslav Klose | Germany | 5 (7) | – |
| 2010 | Thomas Müller / David Villa / Wesley Sneijder / Diego Forlán | Germany / Spain / Netherlands / Uruguay | 5 (7) each | Best Young Player |
| 2014 | James Rodríguez | Colombia | 6 (5) | – |
| 2018 | Harry Kane | England | 6 (6) | – |
| 2022 | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| 2026 | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| 2030 | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
While there was always a count of the top goal-scorers in every edition of the FIFA World Cup, the first time an actual award was given out to the top scorer was in 1982, under a name called the Golden Shoe award, making Italy’s Paolo Rossi the first real recipient of the award. It was only in 2010 that the award was then renamed from Shoe to ‘Golden Boot’.
SEE ALSO: List of all FIFA World Cup winners
In the FIFA 1962 World Cup, we saw as many as 6 players ending with 4 goals each, and all of them were awarded the Golden Boot prize – Garrincha, Vavá, Leonel Sánchez, Flórián Albert, Valentin Ivanov, and Dražan Jerković. Till date, Just Fontaine from France remains the highest goal scorer in a single edition of a World Cup, scoring 13 goals in only 6 games in the 1958 World Cup.
Only two other players have managed to find the net so many times to have recorded a double-digit goals tally in a single edition – Hungary’s Sándor Kocsis in the 1954 World Cup (11 goals) and West Germany’s Gerd Müller who got 10 goals in the 1970 FIFA World Cup. For more updates from the FIFA World Cup and other football tournaments from around the world, stay tuned to ReadScoops.com.
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