Of all the individual honours in football, the Golden Boot looks like the most objective. No voting, no committees, no arguments about intangibles. Count the goals, hand over the trophy.
Which is exactly why it's worth pointing out how much of it is decided by things other than how good the striker is.
Penalties
Start with the obvious one. A designated penalty taker in a team that wins a lot of penalties can add eight to twelve goals to his tally in a season. That's not a marginal effect, that's frequently the entire margin of victory in a Golden Boot race.
Penalties are a real skill and converting them consistently under pressure is not trivial. But it's a different skill to open-play finishing, and it's a skill that only counts if your manager gives you the ball, which is a decision made by somebody else.
Two strikers with identical open-play output, one of whom takes his team's penalties, will finish the season eight or nine goals apart. That gap says almost nothing about which is the better player.
Chance volume
The bigger factor and the less discussed one. A striker in a dominant team receives far more shooting opportunities than one in a mid-table side, and the opportunities he receives are of higher quality.
This isn't a small effect. The difference in shots inside the box per ninety minutes between a forward in a title-winning team and one in a struggling side can be a factor of two. Give the same finisher twice as many chances and he'll score roughly twice as many goals.
Which means the Golden Boot is, to a significant degree, an award for playing in a good team. Historically, the winner is almost always from a top-three side, and that's not because top-three sides employ all the best finishers.
Style of team
Two equally strong teams can produce wildly different striker outputs depending on how they attack.
A team that plays through a single central striker, feeding him crosses and cutbacks, will concentrate its goals in one player. A team that attacks with fluid rotation and inverted wingers cutting inside will spread the same total across four or five players. The centre-forward in the second team might be the better footballer and finish with half the goals.
There's also the tactical question of who takes shots from range. Some teams encourage it, some ban it. A striker at a club where midfielders are told to shoot from 25 yards has fewer opportunities than one where everything is worked into the box.
Availability
Boring but decisive. The Golden Boot is a counting stat, so it rewards playing every match.
A striker who misses eight games with a hamstring problem loses roughly a quarter of his opportunity, and no amount of quality makes that up. This means the award systematically favours durable players over brilliant ones, and it means a genuinely superior finisher can lose to a lesser one who happened to stay fit.
Related: it favours players whose managers don't rotate. A striker at a club competing on four fronts might be rested for cup ties or taken off at 70 minutes with a lead. His rival at a club with only the league to think about plays every minute.
What would be better
Nothing complicated, and I'm not seriously proposing the sport change a hundred-year-old award. But if you wanted to identify the best finisher rather than the highest scorer, a few adjustments would do it.
Non-penalty goals per ninety minutes is the obvious first step and it's already how most analysts think about it informally. It removes the penalty distortion and the availability distortion in one move.
Beyond that, goals minus expected goals gets at the finishing skill specifically — is this player converting his chances better than an average player would from the same positions. It's noisy over a single season, which is a real limitation, but over three seasons it's quite informative.
And if you want the complete picture, some measure of chance quality received tells you whether the striker is being served or having to create for himself. Two forwards with identical goal counts, one taking shots from an average of eight yards and one from fourteen, are not comparable players.
Why it doesn't matter much anyway
I should say, having spent all this time complaining, that the Golden Boot is a fun thing and the arguments about it are part of the pleasure of a season. Nobody actually thinks the winner is definitively the best striker in the league, and the race being partly determined by circumstance is arguably what makes it interesting.
The problem is only when it gets used as evidence in a serious evaluation — in transfer decisions, in contract negotiations, in arguments about who should be in a national squad. There, a raw goal count is a genuinely poor instrument, and the people making those decisions mostly know it.
The rest of us can keep enjoying the race. Just don't confuse the leader with the answer to a different question.