RichThesaurus
tread in someone's footsteps
vs
tread in someone's steps
tread in someone's footsteps
tread in someone's steps
verb
To follow someone's example; to behave as someone did.
How often have the words
tread in someone's footsteps
and
tread in someone's steps
occurred in a corpus of books?
(source:
Google Ngram Viewer
)