11 days to the World Cup: Why being the tournament's top scorer might be a bad sign

Sun, May 31, 2026 at 12:04 PM UTC

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11 days to the World Cup: Why being the tournament's top scorer might be a bad sign

The countdown to the 2026 World Cup is on! Each day ahead of the tournament’s return to North America, Yahoo Sports will highlight an insight or moment that showcases just how grand the world’s biggest sporting spectacle has become — even beyond the expanded field of this year’s global event.

Soccer may seem to be all about scoring goals. But at the World Cup, it’s proven that scoring the most goals doesn’t necessarily take you all the way to the trophy: Historically, in fact, the top-scoring teams and players at the tournament don’t end up winning the title.

When taking a look at Golden Boot winners, the honor given to the highest-scoring player, the discrepancy between scoring the most goals and actually winning the World Cup is shockingly large. Only two outright Golden Boot winners also won the World Cup, an incredibly small club that includes Argentina’s Mario Kempes (1978) and Brazil’s Ronaldo (2002).

(There was also an odd instance of a six-way Golden Boot tie in 1962; two of the six played for the eventual champions, Brazil.)

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Overwhelmingly, though, Golden Boot winners have ended in second or third place. Six of the top scorers ended as the runner-up in the tournament; that includes the first-ever Golden Boot winner in 1930, Argentina’s Guillermo Stabile, and the most recent winner, France’s Kylian Mbappé. Nine Golden Boots have gone to players on third-place teams.

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For those players, the award ends up being more of a consolation prize, rather than an honor. Mbappé’s sad trudge to get his Golden Boot trophy in 2022 is a perfect reminder of that contrast.

Team-wise, less than half of the top-scoring teams in the tournament have also ended up winning it all: Only nine years, out of 22 total World Cups, have seen the trophy go to the team with the most goals. That includes 1978, when Argentina, which ended up winning the title, tied with the Netherlands with 15 total goals scored.

At first, it’s a stat that seems counterintuitive: Obviously, offense is a major piece of soccer. But there are so many other factors that go into a winning team or even a high-scoring team.

One notable factor at play is the number of games that are played. Teams who make it past the quarterfinals are guaranteed to play two more games: a semifinal, and then either the final or a third-place match. That leaves more games to rack up more goals.

As a result, though, one of the biggest outliers in the individual honor is 1994 co-Golden Boot winner Oleg Salenko of Russia. While Salenko’s award-mate, Bulgaria’s Hristo Stoichkov, finished in fourth place with his team, Salenko and Russia didn’t even make it out of the group stage. And yet both Stoichkov and Salenko finished with six goals apiece.

Another key factor is that penalty shootouts don’t count toward the final goal tally. That ends up making a big difference in the knockout round; if an evenly matched draw ends in a shootout, one team will be moving on regardless of the goal totals.

Still, this trend points to the fact that there are dozens of things that can make a difference: an incredible goalkeeping performance, a smothering defense, some key refereeing calls. Scoring goals certainly helps — it’s just not the only thing that leads to a trophy.

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Source: “AOL Sports”