In the end, the winner of this season's Golden Boot isn't Lewandowski or CR7 but the Italian striker Immobile. With 36 goals he matches the Serie A record from Higuain with the most goals scored in 1 single season.
This is the first Golden Boot for Immobile, and what will surprise most people that don't follow European football is that this striker isn't considered an elite player. He plays for Lazio, which is a B tier team and is never a candidate for winning the Italian league, much less any European tournament such as the Champions League, or the less valuable Europa League.
Before this season, Immobile has only had 1 good season scoring-wise, it was 2 years ago when he scored 29 goals in the Italian league which was enough to be the top scorer for the league (along with Icardi) but not enough to win the Golden Boot. That year Messi was the winner of the Golden Boot with 34 goals. In continental competitions, Immobile has never scored an important amount of goals.
Taking everything into consideration, is Immobile the worst Golden Boot winner of recent years? In my opinion, he is. This decade there have been 2 record-breaking goal scorers, Messi, and CR7. These 2, along with Luis Suarez were the only winners of this individual trophy for the past 10 years. All of them have won multiple leagues, and Messi & CR7 have also won multiple Champions League. These 2 are also the top 2 all-time goal scorers of the Champions League.
So after having these titans win this trophy for so many years, then out of nowhere comes Immobile, who is a player with no important trophy and becomes the new winner of the Golden Boot. This is good for him and for Lazio fans of course, but this might also signal that the amazing performance from historic players we have been enjoying for more than a decade appears to be ceasing.
There are new talents emerging of course, such as Mbappe who last year was close to defeating Messi in the Golden Boot, and Haaland, who is a young striker from Norway and appears to have a lot of potential.
It is worth mentioning that Lewandowski, the striker who was close to winning this year's Golden Boot until Immobile started to score match after match in the season's last matches, he is what could be considered an elite striker. He has won multiple leagues with his team Bayern Munich, and he has been very close to winning the Champions League as well, who knows, maybe this year will be Bayern's year in the Champions. But what I would like to say is that the German league lasts 34 matches, while the French, Spanish, Italian, English leagues all have 38 matches. This leaves strikers from the German league with a clear disadvantage because they have fewer games available to score goals.
I believe that if Lewandowski had had 4 more matches, he would have outscored Immobile, and he would have been the new Golden Boot winner. But tough luck for Lewa and congrats to Immobile!
The next exciting events in European football are Champions League matches starting this Friday.