The Golden Shoe. Once again, it was Romanian wonder – and thus continuing to build suspicions and tensions around the fairness of this trophy. Baltazar (Atletico Madrid and Brazil) finished 3rd with 35 goals. This was fair. Second was Marcel Coras (Victoria Bucharest and Romania) with 36 goals. By itself, possibly fair…
Dorin Mateut (Dinamo Bucharest and Romania) was the top European scorer with 43 goals. Great achievement, but… Romanians were already under big suspicion and this season 2 of the top 3 were Romanians. Not only that, but Coras was fairly unknown player, playing for what was practically second team of Dinamo Bucharest and he was beaten by player of the first team…
Mateut was awarded and there was no big fuss – the 24-years old was already a national team player, a rapidly rising star, playing for strong and high scoring team. What did not sit well was that Mateut’s goals came out of nowhere – before joining Dinamo, he scored about 35 goals in total for his previous club. And for all his years with Dinamo Mateut scored 80 goals – half of them this season. Somehow, it was either lucky great season in which every ball he touched ended in the net, or something else was ‘organized’. But there was nothing provable… Mateut was young talented player, may be he was a natural scorer after all. It is only after considerable time, when his career could be seen in full, possible to see he was not a great scorer at all. But this was impossible to know in 1989. In any case his numbers stay and his Golden Shoe was not contested.
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