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This season's Golden Boot race in the PL is one that is being hotly contested at one of the highest levels the world has ever seen. At this rate, current leader Harry Kane will be notching up 33 goals, the highest tally since the league downsized from 42 to 38 games (From 22 teams to 20 teams) in 1995.
But with Manchester City 17 points clear of Kane's Tottenham - and with one game in hand - it seems that for the fifth consecutive season, the Premier League's top scorer will have to settle with the Golden Boot, but no similarly-colored medal to match.
In fact, history suggests the league's most prolific marksman is more likely to not play for the champions, than he is to play for them. In 16 of the Premier League's 25 seasons, the top scorer hasn't won the title.
Only Alan Shearer (Blackburn Rovers), Dwight Yorke (Manchester United), Thierry Henry (Arsenal), Ruud van Nistelrooy (Manchester United), Thierry Henry (Arsenal), Cristiano Ronaldo (Manchester United), Didier Drogba (Chelsea), Dimitar Berbatov (Manchester United) and Robin van Persie (Manchester United) have managed to win the league while also managing to win the Golden boot.
This trend has rung true the last four seasons - the longest spell since the Premier League's inception - with Luis Suarez (31), Sergio Aguero (26) and Kane's (25, 29) poaching efforts only enough to steer their sides to second- and third-place finishes.
Those three averaged 6.75 goals more than the champions' chief scorers, raising the notion that if a team is more heavily reliant on one source for goals, then perhaps the team as a whole is not good enough to consolidate a title challenge.
That certainly applies to Suarez, whose brilliance masked some people's judgement of Brendan Rodgers' managerial capabilities, while Kane has scored 37% of Tottenham's league goals since the 2014/15 season.
Indeed, 63% of the time in which the champions' top scorer hasn't won the Golden Boot, he has scored below 20 goals, enthusing the idea that one player needn't score masses, as the buck of responsibility is shared among other attacking talents in the team.
It's no shock that Jose Mourinho's well-oiled 2004/05 Chelsea side managed this goal distribution the most efficiently, with top scorer Frank Lampard notching 13 goals - the lowest of any title-winning side.
Poignantly, in Sir Alex Ferguson's 90s Manchester United teams - heralded for their balance and rich attacking rosters, they won five league titles but having the league's top scorer only once, when Dwight Yorke scored a joint-low 18 goals to claim the Golden Boot in 1998/99.
But with possession and pressing being the two attacking trends rife in today's Premier League, more strikers are benefiting with their occupational advantage. The league itself, along with football as a whole, has grown in a way that supports the scoring of goals and it shows - the Golden Boot hasn't been won without scoring 25 goals or more in the last five seasons, and the last eight top scorers for the champions have all notched 20 or more.
With Kane (24), Mohamed Salah (23) and Sergio Aguero (21) all hitting the 20-goal and 10 games remaining, both trends look set to continue in an increasingly striker-dominated Premier League.
