Should penalties stop counting in the Golden Boot race? (2024)

“Now, I sit here and regret it,” Les Ferdinand says. “And, as I’m having this conversation, I’m thinking, ‘You idiot. Why didn’t you take them?’ I was young and I thought differently back then. But it was a silly thought process.”

Ferdinand is talking about penalties. For good reason too, bearing in mind not just his own story but also the extraordinary number of penalties that are being awarded these days (25 in the first 38 Premier League games of the season) and the impact that will have on the individual award that eluded him: the Golden Boot.

Essentially, we’re discussing whether the time has come to rethink how we define goalscorers and if we’re now at a stage where a player can’t win the Golden Boot if he doesn’t take penalties. And if that is the case, which both Ferdinand and myself seem to have accepted it is, should we start to think about excluding penalties from the top goalscorer list?

Ferdinand breaks into laughter as he hears that controversial question. “This comes a little bit late,” he says, smiling.

About 27 years late. Back in 1993, Ferdinand finished runner up to Teddy Sheringham in the race for the Golden Boot. Sheringham scored 22 Premier League goals for Nottingham Forest and Tottenham Hotspur in 1992-93, but six of them were penalties. Ferdinand scored 20 for Queens Park Rangers and none of them was from the spot.

Two years later, Alan Shearer, who was playing for Blackburn Rovers at the time, won the Golden Boot with 34 goals, including 10 penalties. Ferdinand, still at QPR, scored 24 that season and, once again, none of them was from the spot.

In fact, a trawl through the record books shows that penalties have been the determining factor on 12 occasions when it comes to the winner of the Premier League’s Golden Boot.

“There are not many people that go back and look at that,” Ferdinand says, alluding to his own record as much as anything. “But, listen, I still think that taking penalties is an art. And I decided not to involve myself in that bit of art. I take my hat off to those boys who took them. You look at Matt Le Tissier’s record and it was phenomenal.”

Le Tissier scored 47 out of 48 penalties. As for Ferdinand, he never missed one in the Premier League. He never scored one either. Incredibly, not one of his 149 Premier League goals was a penalty, which is a record.

The downside is — and this isn’t lost on Ferdinand now — that the Premier League’s 10th-highest goalscorer of all time was at a severe disadvantage when it came to trying to win the Golden Boot that a lot of strikers dream about.

So why didn’t he take any penalties? “Stupidity,” Ferdinand says, bluntly. “When I think about it now… when I got into the team (at QPR), there was already a penalty-taker. Roy Wegerle took them, then Clive Wilson started taking them. He had an exemplary record and then when I went to Newcastle, Peter Beardsley would take them (before Shearer).

“But, to be honest with you, the truth is if I’d have said, ‘I want to take them’, I don’t think anyone would have stopped me. But then I had that (thought), ‘I’m going to go through my career without taking a penalty and see how many goals I’m going to score’. That’s what I thought back then. But do you know what? I regret it.”

Ferdinand’s story provides some interesting context to a subject that appears even more relevant now and that he is well qualified to talk about. “I’m looking every week and when you see the scoreline, you think, ‘How many of those were penalties?’ It’s just ridiculous,” says Ferdinand, who is now QPR’s director of football. “You’d go through the whole of the weekend’s fixtures years ago and you might have two penalties. Now you’re getting two in a game.”

He has a point. As things stand, we’re on course for 250 penalties to be awarded in the Premier League this season, which is more than double the current record (112) and almost five times as many as some of the seasons when Ferdinand played.

Jamie Vardy has already scored four penalties, which is as many as he converted in the whole of last season (it could have been five if he hadn’t been substituted against Manchester City after completing his hat-trick), Jorginho has three to his name (he also missed one), while Mohamed Salah, Bruno Fernandes, Callum Wilson and Neal Maupay have two each.

Even if the current average drops as a result of referees showing more leniency around the new handball rules, it’s clear that this is going to be a record-breaking season when it comes to penalties, as was the case in Serie A in 2019-20.

In Italy, the combination of VAR and the implementation of the new handball rule led to an unprecedented number of spot kicks (Lazio alone were awarded 18 penalties, with eight other clubs receiving 10 or more) and propelled Ciro Immobile to the top of the goalscoring charts in Europe, not just Serie A. Immobile, the Lazio striker, scored 36 Serie A goals, with a remarkable 14 coming via the penalty spot, to equal Gonzalo Higuain’s Serie A record and win Europe’s Golden Shoe. Do all those penalties diminish Immobile’s achievement in any way? Should Higuain’s season, in which he scored three penalties, be held in higher regard?

Wherever you stand on that debate, it’s very possible that we will see something similar happen here this season and that Salah’s record of 32 goals in a (38-game) Premier League season will be beaten.

Although these are very early days, which means that the sample size is extremely small, some of the facts and figures feel almost farcical. There are currently 11 players in the Premier League averaging at least a goal every 90 minutes. Vardy has scored five goals from six shots. Son Heung-min is averaging a goal every 50 minutes.

Ironically, given everything that we’ve been discussing, the top two goalscorers in the Premier League at the moment — Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Son — aren’t on penalties. But is it realistic to think that either player, or anybody else for that matter, could be out in front in May if they don’t have the opportunity to add to their total every time the referee points to the spot?

“I would say, ‘No’. I think that would be very hard when you see the number of penalties being given,” Ferdinand says. “And you’ve just been talking to me about not many defenders taking penalties any more, so it’s usually your frontmen or strikers, so in that instance, it’s going to be very difficult for somebody else to score that amount of goals in a season without taking a penalty.”

Defenders cropped up because it is striking to see how much more common it was years ago for clubs to have a specialist penalty-taker who wasn’t a striker or a midfielder. For example, Steve Bruce and Denis Irwin both took penalties for Manchester United. Frank Leboeuf had that responsibility for Chelsea, Julian Dicks for West Ham United, Stuart Pearce for Nottingham Forest, Michael Ball and David Unsworth for Everton, and Clive Wilson for QPR. What was it about left-backs and penalties?

Nowadays it tends to be a striker who grabs hold of the ball and, quite frankly, why wouldn’t you if there’s a chance to add 10 goals-plus to your tally each season? A couple of obvious exceptions to that (there are others in the Premier League too) are Fernandes at United and Jorginho at Chelsea. Indeed, it seems strange to think that Timo Werner, who has yet to get off the mark since joining from RB Leipzig, could be averaging a goal per game if he was on spot-kick duties at Stamford Bridge. Would the relatively slow start he has made to his Chelsea career be viewed totally differently if he’d dispatched four penalties?

Either way, could Jorginho not have let him take the second that Chelsea were awarded against Crystal Palace, when Tammy Abraham also tried to get in on the act?

With Fernandes at United, it is impossible to argue with his record — all the more so when Marcus Rashford, Paul Pogba and Anthony Martial all missed penalties last season. Remarkably, United were awarded 14 spot kicks in that campaign, which was a Premier League record — it almost certainly won’t be by the end of this season (Leicester City have already won five).

Last season, Manchester City were a bit like your under-10s team from back in the day, whereby everybody got to have a go at taking a penalty. Sergio Aguero, Ilkay Gundogan, Raheem Sterling, Riyad Mahrez, Gabriel Jesus and Kevin De Bruyne all tried their luck and scored six out of 11 between them.

Actually, it’s not about trying your luck. Penalty-taking is clearly a skill. Or, in the words of Ferdinand, an art. Kane will sometimes practise up to 50 after training. When Shearer was playing, he could take 30-40 the day before a game. Le Tissier used to pay the youth team goalkeeper at Southampton £10 every time he saved one (it’s safe to say he didn’t part with much money). Dedication gets rewarded. And why shouldn’t it?

The issue now, though, is the sheer number of penalties and how that skews the picture when we look at the goalscoring charts. When Ferdinand goes through the runners and riders at the end of the season, would he want to know how many goals were penalties? “Yeah, I think that’s the question you ask all the time. And what is it, 70 per cent of penalties are scored? You are expected to score. So the chances are, if you have 10, you’re going to score seven. That’s a lot to make up.”

That success rate actually sits at 78.2 per cent since the start of the 2015-16 season, which gives a guide as to how significant the increase in penalties will be when it comes to the number of goals in matches in general as well as the ramifications for the Golden Boot.

Does any of this really matter? To some strikers, no. Vardy, for example, was extremely proud to win the Golden Boot last season at the age of 33 but when he missed out by one four years earlier, after blazing a penalty over the bar in the final home game of Leicester’s title-winning season, it never bothered him in the slightest.

To others, you bet it matters. Salah and Kane, who has already registered 17 shots in four matches (he’d be on 14 goals with Vardy’s conversion rate), are not there to make up the numbers in the Golden Boot race. They want to be No 1, just as Ruud van Nistelrooy did when he was at Manchester United.

Paul Scholes tells a story about Van Nistelrooy getting on the team bus after United matches and “the first thing he would do is see if Thierry Henry had scored. If Henry had scored, he wouldn’t talk to anybody for the full trip home because he was so engrossed in being the leading goalscorer. Not just at United but in the league, in the world, everywhere.”

Henry was Van Nistelrooy’s nemesis. The Dutchman only pipped him to the Golden Boot once, in 2002-03, when he scored 25 goals to Henry’s 24. Van Nistelrooy scored eight penalties that season. Henry scored three. Perhaps more significant was the fact that Henry also finished with 20 assists — a long-standing record that De Bruyne equalled last season.

Although Ferdinand missed out on the golden boot, a few have won it without scoring a penalty in a season, most recently Sadio Mane in 2018-19, when the Liverpool forward tied with Salah, his team-mate, and Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang on 22 goals.

The others over the years are Luis Suarez (2013-14 – 31 goals), Dimitar Berbatov (2010-11 – 20), Nicolas Anelka (2008-09 – 19), Didier Drogba (2006-07 – 20), Thierry Henry (2004-05 – 25), Dwight Yorke and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink (1998-99 – 18), and Andy Cole (1993-94 – 34).

Suarez and Cole jump out for obvious reasons. Liverpool had 12 penalties in that 2013-14 season when they finished runners up to Manchester City, with Steven Gerrard taking 11 of them. So Suarez could, in theory, have been the first player to break the 40-goal barrier in the Premier League. Cole had an opportunity to do the same 20 years earlier (albeit in a 42-game season) but Beardsley and Malcolm Allen took Newcastle’s eight penalties between them.

It seems a big ask to expect anybody to outscore a penalty-taker now. Could Mane, realistically, go toe to toe with Salah again? Does Calvert-Lewin need to have a word with Richarlison, the Everton penalty-taker, if he wants to stay on top of the pile? If Son took penalties this season, would he finish above Kane?

There are more questions than answers, including the one that was posed to Ferdinand at the very start, when we talked about whether we should be putting an asterisk next to a player’s goal tally now, or even taking penalties out of the equation altogether when it comes to the list of top scorers.

“You’re saying should we get rid of them now, but there’s pressure taking penalties in front of a crowd,” Ferdinand says. “I think there’s less pressure in front of an empty stadium. So if the crowd were there, I’d say to you ‘no’. It’s part of the art.”

Ferdinand pauses for a moment and laughs. “Put it to a public vote!”

(Top image: Tom Slator for The Athletic/Getty Images)

So we did… almost 2,500 of you voted and this is what you said