It is around the late stages of a tournament when you hear the football truisms: "It doesn't matter how you got there," "The results don't record performance." What matters -- the only thing that matters -- is that you pick up the trophy at the end, or so the argument goes. But there is one tournament award in which this argument isn't so straight forward: the Golden Boot.
At the 1994 World Cup, for example, both Hristo Stoichkov and Oleg Salenko won the Golden Boot. But did their six strikes apiece mean the same thing? Stoichkov scored the goals that fired Bulgaria to a historic semifinal for his country, while five of Salenko's goals came in an ultimately irrelevant 6-1 win over Cameroon, as Russia went out in the first round.