There was a time when 20 goals would be enough to win the Golden Boot. That time has passed.

The last seven top scorers struck at least 25 times to top the charts, with Mohamed Salah netting 32 – the third-highest total in Premier League history – last season.

With huge hauls now required to win the award, strikers really can’t afford to miss games or share the load with a prolific partner.

The last seven Golden Boot winners all started at least 75 per cent of their team’s matches in that season, and scored over 30 per cent of their club’s total Premier League goals.

So while Sergio Aguero  is among the favourites to win this season’s award, the presence of Gabriel Jesus means the 2014/15 top scorer is probably best avoided.

Jesus has looked like a potential top scorer during his time at City, but he looks unlikely to play enough to score more than the other top contenders. He’s also too young, given that no player under the age of 22 has won the award since Michael Owen in 1999.

Alexandre Lacazette tallied a disappointing 14 goals in his first season at Arsenal and will likely see reduced opportunities this time around thanks to the arrival of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in January.

Aubameyang is definitely the likelier of the Gunners duo to reach 30 goals, but he would be breaking a trend if he managed to win the Golden Boot.

Just one of the last 19 top scorers was in their first full Premier League season, and that was Salah , who had played two half-seasons for Chelsea in the past.

Salah was remarkably prolific last season, scoring at a rate of 0.89 goals per game, but his chances of repeating that are slim, as only two players have won back-to-back Golden Boots in the last 12 seasons.

Only four times in history has a player followed up a 30-goal season in the Premier League by winning the Golden Boot.

Romelu Lukaku and Alvaro Morata will both lead the line in their second seasons with Manchester United and Chelsea respectively, but those clubs each scored fewer than 69 goals last season.

That’s significant, with seven of the last eight Golden Boot winners playing for a side that notched at least 74 league goals.

The numbers all lead to one man: Harry Kane  , the current favourite.

The Tottenham striker has scored at a rate of 0.8 goals per game across the last three seasons and has actually bettered his total each year, hitting a career-high of 30 in 2017/18.

Spurs scored 74 goals in the Premier League last season – of which Kane scored a ridiculous 41 per cent – and there’s no real chance of him yielding goals to Heung-Min Son or Fernando Llorente.

Kane’s the obvious choice, and also the right one.

It’s worth backing some players each-way at bigger prices, and Jamie Vardy  is certainly good value.

The Leicester striker has finished in the top-four scorers in two of the last three seasons, bagged 20 goals in 2017/18, and will be the sole focal point of the Foxes’ attack this term after Riyad Mahrez’s departure.

Cenk Tosun  is another decent bet.

The Turkish international scored five in 14 appearances after joining Everton in January, and that was with Sam Allardyce as his manager.

With the much more attacking Marco Silva now in charge at Goodison Park, it’s not unforeseeable that Tosun could reach 20 goals, which would be good enough for an each-way place in each of the last eight seasons.

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