In soccer, a Golden Boot is one of the most important individual trophies awarded to a player that managed to score the most goals during a league season. Likewise, Champion is the title awarded to a team that earned the most amount of points throughout a season. Let's repeat it again: individual award — for goals, team award — for points.
There is an indirect relationship between the goals and points. If only there was a "translator" from goals to the points, we could've ended up with a useful metric that measured players' success on the same scale as the teams'. If patiently scrolled throughout the page, the author will try to explain his (naive, simple, subjective) idea on how we could measure both the team and the player success on the scale that matters the most: by number of points.
This is what an English Premier League table looked like at the end of 2008-2009 season. The #1 ranked team - Manchester U - won the league title. Let's look at the anatomy of how a team wins the title.
The ultimate metric to identify a champion is the number of POINTS (pts) earned by a team throughout a season. At the end of the season a team with the most points becomes a champion.
Points are earned by WINNING (w) or DRAWING (d) a game.
A winning team earns three points, a losing team gets zero points. In case of a draw, each team is awarded a point.
A team wins a game if it scores more goals than its opponent. GOALS FOR (gf) stat in this table is the total number of goals scored by a team throughout the season.
Some of these goals are more "responsible" for team points than the others. For every played game, let's attribute team's earned POINTS to A GOAL that is responsible for a win or a tie in that game.
If a team won a game, it is awarded three points. Now, the objective is to find a goal that secured those points.
For the purpose of this analysis, let's attribute the winning team's three points to the goal that ensured the victory: the goal scored to put the winning team in the lead (similar to ice hockey's definition of game winning goal).
Example: in a 5-0 game, the game winnnig goal would be the first goal
Example: in a 5-2 game, the game winnnig goal would be the third goal scored by the winning team
In case of a draw, each team earns one point. Let's attribute ONE point to the goal (one for each team, if any goals were scored) that ensured score equality.
Example: in a 3-3 game, the third goal scored by each team are the tying goals
942 goals were scored in 2008/2009 Premier League season. Using the method described above, let's assign points to the goals that made the difference.
98 goals have tied the game and each is attributed with ONE point.
264 goals ensured victories for their teams, each one is attributed with THREE points.
Now that all goals scored have been assigned their corresponding points, we can find which player actually "scored most points"
For context, here is what a Golden Boot standings look like: Anelka has won it with 19 scored goals.
When players are sorted by their point contributions, Defoe and Lampard are ahead of everyone. Although Defoe scored only 11 goals, his team benefited from his six game-winning and one game-tying goals. That is 19 points, that makes him tie for the first place in this Golden-mutant boot standings.
For comparison, the Golden Boot winner had only 13 points.
Dear Premier League FA, please give Defoe and Lampard an award they deserved in 2008/2009 season.
👉