As Heung-min Son dropped to his knees at Bilbao’s San Mames Stadium following the final whistle of the UEFA Europa League final in May, the emotional mix between a celebratory scream and loud cry was a familiar sight. It was the expected reaction of a player who had not only won his first title, but captained a team that snapped a 17-year trophy drought. Nor was it a surprise when his teammates gave him one emotional embrace after another, signs from the Tottenham Hotspur faithful emblazoned with his name and face. Son — and his teammate James Maddison, for that matter — would not be the first player whose face was bright pink from crying, nor the first to be an unquestionable fan favorite.
There is a feeling of routine to these moments of sporting achievement, much as there was a reliability that Son boasted during his 10 years as a Premier League player. His consistency as, at the very least, one of the league’s most notable attackers almost disguises the fact that he was also one of the game’s superstars during his time in England. Son, who announced his intention to leave Spurs on Saturday and is likely to join MLS’ LAFC, leaves Europe’s elites not only as a club legend; he was well and truly one of the greats of his generation, delivering one of the sport’s greatest stories of triumph along the way.
Son’s career is a story of skill, style and surprise in almost equal measure to the point that he was universally respected, if not downright adored by the masses. The ease with which the applause came was the unique foundation to overlook his star, though. There were undoubtedly better players than Son in the last 10 years and ones that commanded more spotlight, at least from a European perspective. It unfairly diminished his own attributes, but the signs are easy to spot. After all, how else would you describe a player with 173 goals in 454 Spurs games, a captain who consistently did his country proud and carved out an unlikely home in north London as anything but a great?
Son’s historic attacking output
Son joined Tottenham in the summer of 2015 as the club’s most expensive signing of the summer, Spurs sending around $30 million to Bayer Leverkusen for a 23-year-old player. It was a modest fee, the 11th-highest paid by a Premier League club that summer, the likes of Manchester City-bound Kevin de Bruyne and eventual Manchester United misfit Morgan Schneiderlin fetching more money. There were glimpses of something special with Son, even if he was not the buzziest newcomer of the season – he became the most expensive Asian player at the time and already had an admirer in Ruud van Nistelrooy, who described him as a “massive talent” when an 18-year-old Son was his teammate at Hamburg. He started somewhat slowly with 8 goals and six assists in 40 games. That was his only single-digit goal season in North London, though, hitting the ground running the following season.
In almost no time, Son became the type of attacker that could happily find a place on any team. He boosted a versatility that exemplified a player who had no preferred position in attack and was skilled with both feet, a practicality and unfussiness befitting this generation’s textbook pace and power attacker. It is a style that was frequently on display and is inherently entertaining – his first Premier League goal against Crystal Palace in September 2015 marked the first of many trademark sprints that allowed him to take a shot from distance, and his 2020 FIFA Puskas Award-winning strike against Burnley was the greatest version of it.
He was the opposite of a tap-in merchant, and in more ways than one. As industrious as a pace and power player can be, Son mixed in plenty of stylish moments along the way. His first season tally included a goal scored with a backheel flick against Watford, he notched a scissor kick goal against Swansea in the following campaign, and his 100th Premier League goal was a curling shot against Brighton and Hove Albion.
His greatest fault was that he was streaky but it was a nitpicky argument perhaps clouded by the fact that other attackers were more prolific but the numbers make it hard to deny that Son was not just amongst elites; he was actually one of them. At his best, Son offered a perfect balance of quality and quantity with 173 goals and 94 assists for Spurs during a decade of excellence, ranking fifth in the team’s all-time goalscorers list, 16th in the Premier League and 17th in the division’s assist tally. Perhaps most impressively, Son ranks third for goal contributions in the Premier League since his debut in September 2015 with 198, behind only Harry Kane with 231 and Mohamed Salah with 270. He is also the Premier League’s only Asian golden boot winner, sharing the award with Salah in the 2021-22 campaign.
Son’s greatest disadvantage, meanwhile, was that Kane soaked up too much of the spotlight, as an academy product emerging as the England captain and the greatest goal scorer of his time is likely to do. Even as Spurs felt like Kane’s team in the eyes of many, it was actually more of a double act. The two played seamlessly together, developing an unrivaled chemistry that was exemplary of two terrific sporting storylines – a homegrown rising through the ranks after several setbacks, combining skillfully with a teammate whose home was half a world away but charted his own unlikely journey to the top. The pair have rightfully earned a spot in the Premier League’s history books by combining for 47 goals, making them the most prolific goalscoring duo in England’s top flight.
His final season at Spurs, by those watching closely, was marred by injuries and perhaps the fact that age slows for no one, but even then, Son’s output was stellar. He may not have been at his best, but 11 goals and 11 assists in 46 matches is definitely not a modest showing, though the most prominent memory of the campaign will be lifting the Europa League, becoming the first Spurs captain in 17 years to do so. It is a fitting exit for a player who performed in moments big and small, even if it was not clear that it was his final act.
“Let’s say I’m a legend,” Son said in a post-match interview after the Europa League final. “Why not? Only today, only today … Seventween years, nobody [had] done it with such amazing players yet today’s the day. Probably I will say today, I’m a legend of this club.”
‘One of the best humans I’ve ever met’
It is alarmingly easy to diminish Son’s impact as one that is business-driven – the sport’s Eurocentric vantage point means places like Asia are associated more with cash grabs and the marketing of preseason tours or the final stages of players’ careers than anything else. Son’s journey from South Korea to England is not only a source of inspiration and a change of pace for a sport in which unexpected superstars are in short supply, though. As easy as it is to quantify the effect Son has had in Spurs’ attack and perhaps on their bank account, his story is an example of the intangible, inexplicable romance that exemplifies sports at their best.
“I came to north London as a kid — 23 years old, a very young age, a boy who couldn’t speak English,” Son said in Seoul on Saturday, nearly 50 miles from his birthplace of Chuncheon, a cit with a population of less than 300,000. “I leave this club as a man. Thank you to all the Spurs fans who have given me so much love. It felt like it was my home.”
Son went from barely knowing English – his third language after learning German by watching episodes of “SpongeBob SquarePants” – to creating a slice of home in north London, leaving the city with a lifelong friend in Wales international Ben Davies. Son attended Davies’ wedding and is the godfather of his son, Ralph, which made it difficult for the Korean player to even break the news to Davies and his other teammates.
“[Davies] fully respects my decision,” Son said. “So does everyone. What can I say? It’s very hard to tell my team-mates because I probably spend more time with them than my family, because we’re travelling together, spending time together every single day at the training ground, five or six hours every day. I think we know each other so well. Everybody was disappointed but, in a way, also very happy for me. That was my feeling, but I don’t know what they were actually feeling. They seemed happy but disappointed when I told them.”
He has earned innumerable admirers during his 10 years with Tottenham, including Maddison, who was incredibly emotional when celebrating the Europa League win Son.
“We had a moment on the pitch at the end and I just said to him how much I loved him, adore him, what he stands for as a person, and to take it all in,” Maddison said in May. “He’s one of the best humans I’ve ever met. I love him so much. I’m so happy he had that moment in Bilbao, lifting the trophy for this club, the club he loves. He’s been here for 10 years and to watch him and share that moment with him, all of this, this is our job, this is what we do, but as a human being, you will not meet a nicer man. How it treats everyone. How he treats my family every time he sees them. How he is with my children. He’s just a brilliant man and I’m so, so happy for him.”
The Spurs faithful were equally as happy for Son, who goes down as perhaps the main character for the team over the last decade. Kane’s will be the first name history remembers when looking back at this period. Toby Alderweireld will go down as the best player as the team made a trip to the 2019 UEFA Champions League final. Mauricio Pochettino will be credited as the man who stewarded Tottenham’s best team in recent memory. Son, though, defines the end of this era.
He is the last notable member of Pochettino’s group to stick around at Spurs but his legacy is entirely separate from the Argentine’s celebrated five-year spell in north London. Son is not a perfect player but his is a perfect story, one in which every trial and tribulation was not only worth it but was marked by layers of marvelousness. Stardom is inherently improbable, even more so for a player from a small city in South Korea who arrived to the Premier League in his mid-20s with limited fanfare. His legacy is greater than his on-field excellence – he exemplifies the grit and passion fans crave from the players on their favorite teams, more than anyone else ever did. Son outlasted them, too, even if this can be attributed to the malpractice of Europe’s greatest clubs and collected Spurs’ most historic moments along the way. In the end, there was no one more fitting to score the first goal at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium or to lift the trophy that ended their 17-year drought. Spurs were never quite Kane’s team or Pochettino’s team during this period, or anyone else’s, for that matter. For the combination of events and experiences, Tottenham Hotspur were well and truly Son’s team, the 33-year-old leaving a unique legacy behind that he summed up succinctly while confetti still dotted the pitch in Bilbao.
“I was able to create my perfect puzzle.”
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