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Non-penalty goals is easily a superior measure of someone's goalscoring than total goals (and non-penalty goals plus assists to then get someone's total scoring contribution).
Penalties are converted at an 80% clip and only one person on a team gets to take them. They inflate tallies purely on the basis that someone is the penalty taker, and could have gone to four or five others on any given team.
While there is undoubtedly some skill involved in slotting a penalty, the vast difference in what a penalty opportunity looks like vs open play/other set pieces make them distorting when trying to assess talent.
I see a reality gap here (how things should be vs how they really are). So apparently someone's grandma would be a Golden Boot winner because only some skill is involved in penalty taking. But even excellent players have all missed some penalties (Mark Viduka missed his against Uruguay in the 2005 decider) and some excellent players missed more penalties than they should have.
https://www.ftbl.com.au/news/krishna-no-more-penal...
"Krishna has been riding the wave of a successful season in front of
goal for Phoenix, notching up 11 goals and putting himself in second
spot for the Golden Boot, behind Adam Le Fondre on 12. But his performance from the spot has been underwhelming, and his
miss against the Jets – his seventh from 13 – was a crushing blow."
So I would agree with some voices here that goals and assists is one statistic, and penalties conversion rate could be another (but I would argue the rate should be counted not "per penalties taken", but per "number of penalties awarded to one's team" to reflect the opportunity rate correctly by removing bias when the penalty taker's selection is not counted as a factor).