Haaland runaway favourite for Golden Boot after opening seven-goal lead | OneFootball

We’re so back. The 25/26 Premier League season is rattling along now, with a familiar name already roaring into a significant lead in the race for the Golden Boot.

Erling Haaland is bidding to reclaim his crown after he and everyone else got Mo Salahed last season, and it’s so far so good with the Big Norwegian currently boasting a whopping seven-goal lead over his nearest yet also very distant challengers.

Here are the actual 10 current favourites for the big shiny shoe, according to oddschecker.com, with each player’s current goal tally in brackets.

6=) Danny Welbeck (6)

Even now, after all this time, he remains dat guy.

6=) Hugo Ekitike (3)

Made a flying start to his Liverpool career but might he just prove a bit too ‘scorer of great goals, not great goalscorer’ across an entire campaign?

6=) Joao Pedro (4)

Has now scored more Premier League goals this season than Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez, which is something.

6=) Nick Woltemade (4)

We are pretty confident of two things. One, Woltemade will become a firm cult hero on Tyneside and score a goodly number of goals. Two, that number will not be sufficient to win the Golden Boot, or probably even get that close. Good bit that he’s already scored two headers when all the evidence from Germany was that, despite looking precisely like someone who would score a lot of headers, he doesn’t actually score many headers.

His penalty against Forest was the very definition of ‘aplomb’.

6=) Alexander Isak (0)

Proven quality but yet to get off the Premier League mark for his new club following that messy and drawn-out departure from Newcastle.

6=) Jean-Philippe Mateta (6)

Four goals in his last three games have got Mateta as close as anyone to the runaway leader, even though that is not particularly close at all.

5) Igor Thiago (6)

Has done a hugely admirable job thus far of filling a pretty hefty void at Brentford.

4) Antoine Semenyo (6)

At some point it really does feel like we’re all going to have to start putting some respect on this start and stop putting him behind people with fewer goals. But he ain’t catching Haaland.

3) Mohamed Salah (4)

2) Viktor Gyokeres (4)

The Proper Striker to finally deliver the title to Arsenal? Not on the evidence of that opening-day performance v Man Utd or the first half against Leeds but definitely possibly of the second half. There was no sign of him adding to that total v Liverpool but he did score v Nottingham Forest and Burnley.

Arsenal’s title challenge is in textbook shape, but there hasn’t been that much contribution from the striker they apparently needed to drag them over the line. The fact that he is already as long as 18s here shows how far he is behind…

1) Erling Haaland (13)

Looking to reclaim his crown after last season’s ‘struggles’ and made – as he generally does – a rapid start to the season with a couple of goals on the opening day as the familiar focal point of a new-look Man City side. It’s an absurd lead at this stage, really, with his own nonsense compounded by none of the other most likely contenders – with all due respect to your Semenyos and Thiagos – doing anything all that compelling to challenge him.