South Korean football star Son Heung-min’s journey to the top

LONDON/SEOUL -- When London football clubs Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United met on Feb. 19, the pre-match talk on sports broadcasts focused on one player: Tottenham’s Son Heung-min. 

Days before the game, without explanation, Tottenham had made a controversial decision to bench the star South Korean forward, who shared the Premier League's Golden Boot award last year for most goals scored. It was only the second time Son has not started a game in the league since 2020.

On game day, Son warmed up with his team and as kickoff approached, he headed to the sidelines.

But calculations slowly changed after the whistle blew.

Tottenham scored early but needed another goal in the second half to seal the win. Suddenly, assistant manager Cristian Stellini waved Son onto the field with 18 minutes left to play.

Four minutes later, he sprinted free of West Ham’s defense onto a pass from England national team captain Harry Kane to send a smart, low shot into the net. 

The crowd of 60,000 came to its feet as Son secured the victory that moved Tottenham into fourth place and on course to qualify for next season’s UEFA Champions League.

It was a moment of triumph among many for the 30-year-old Son. In his seven years at Tottenham, he has become the greatest Asian star in men's football. Son’s face adorns highway billboards and promotional videos for the Premier League, the sport's richest and most competitive league.

His rise has also tracked the growth of football on his home continent: Asia now boasts 546.5 million fans according to Nielsen Sports, and the continent fielded some formidable teams in the World Cup last year.

Son's accomplishment as a Premier League high scorer is unique: No other Asian player has topped the scoring charts in any of Europe's top Big Five leagues, the others residing in Spain, Germany, Italy and France. Son shared the Golden Boot Award with Mohamed Salah of Liverpool FC, with 23 goals apiece. 

He has also been awarded the Best Footballer in Asia prize, organized by China’s Titan Sports Media company, and voted on by journalists in over 40 Asian nations, for eight of the 10 years the award has been in existence. 

"I'm not sure if we will see another Asian player like him in the coming 100 years," said Shin Moon-sun, a football commentator and sports data professor at South Korea's Myongji University. He said Son's skills at controlling the ball while sprinting have helped him to stand out in the Premier League, as has his ability to shoot from the right and left.

This season, however, Son has been in a slump, scoring few goals. Stellini seemed to confirm that Son’s recent performance was why he did not start against West Ham:  “Son had a problem that he bring with him for a bit of time," Stellini said after the West Ham game. "Sometimes, a player that has a problem needs time to recover and be well prepared for the next period.”

But setbacks only seem to push Son harder to excel: Last September, after Tottenham head coach Antonio Conte chose not to put him on the starting roster, he came into the game as a substitute and scored three goals against Leicester City. “To have a player of Son’s level on the bench means that in one moment, I can change the game,” Conte said at the time.

After that episode, Son admitted he had been “frustrated” by his recent play. Without the usual bluster or ego common in the top leagues of professional football, he contritely told Sky Sports, “I can do much better than I have been.”

Chasing dreams

Son is used to struggling. He left his native South Korea at 16, moving to Hamburg and a future in European football. As one of a very few Asian players in European leagues, Son has had to overcome prejudice and entrenched attitudes among European clubs that Asian players are second-rate -- a view he has helped to change. 

“There were massive, massive challenges, but I'm never scared about these challenges,” Son said of his experience in a recent interview with Nikkei Asia at Tottenham’s sleek new stadium in London, arranged by AIA Singapore, the insurance company which has made Son its brand ambassador.

“When I was a child … I always wanted to chase my dream. Chasing this dream never made me scared,” he told Nikkei.  

Son’s rise seems to herald the advance of Asian football worldwide, most recently displayed at the World Cup in November and December, with solid performances by South Korea and Japan. Son’s play helped put a strong South Korean men's squad into the Round of 16 for only the third time ever, defeating Portugal on Dec. 2.  

However, there remains a very real gulf in talent between Asian and European football that makes Son’s achievement all the more remarkable. Son said in his interview with Nikkei he would like to see this gap between Asian clubs and their European counterparts narrow.

“There's still a lot of work to do in Asian clubs," he said. "I think the gap is still massive. To close the gap, I think Asian football [clubs] have to improve.

“[The leagues] have to improve like what we [have] done in 2022 in the World Cup. I think Asian teams did an amazing job.

"[Asian clubs have] really, really good players. But the people do not recognize how good they are. ... Really, it's sad."

Son himself is a testament to how much native talent there is in Asian football already. He grew up in South Korea, his father and brother have both been professional footballers. He started playing football in the third grade, under the tutelage of his father, Son Woong-jung, a highly regarded player before an injury ended his career at the age of 28. 

“He’s my idol; he's my role model," Son said of his father. "He is a football friend, a football teacher, amazing. The bottom line is, he was tough, but he was tough on the pitch. Outside of the pitch he was really nice, being an amazing father, so I think because of him I'm here."

Long road to the top

Woong-jung coached his son until age 14, when Son led his middle school in Chuncheon, Gangwon province, to the final match in the national middle school championships. While losing the final, Son was the top scorer with five goals in the tournament and was already drawing attention from scouts for professional leagues. 

Following this, he moved to Dongbuk High School, an elite sports school in Seoul attended by many top football players, and by age 16 he had been picked by scouts from Germany’s Hamburg SV's youth club.

This eventually led to a two-year stint at Bayer Leverkusen, a team in the German Bundesliga, the top German league, where he signed for a reported fee of 10 million euros ($10.5 million), staying from 2013 to 2015. Son scored 29 goals in 87 appearances, helping the team reach the UEFA Champions League, the pinnacle of club football. 

However, Son was unhappy. In his autobiography, “Thoughts on Football,” he wrote of tension with the Leverkusen head coach, who, he said, replaced him frequently with no explanation during games. He found this humiliating. “I was under stress as weird replacements repeated in the second half of the 2014-15 season,” Son wrote in the essay "Thoughts on soccer," which was published in Korean in 2020.  

His luck changed with the sudden arrival in 2015 of Tottenham’s Chairman Daniel Levy, who flew to Leverkusen in his private helicopter to strike a deal for Son, according to Woong-jung. 

Levy, Son’s father said, would not take no for an answer, but “the talks did not go smoothly,” he told South Korean talk show "You Quiz on the Block” in December. “Leverkusen insisted that they would not let him go.” Levy could not be reached for comment.

According to his contract, Leverkusen said it could legally hold Son for three more years. Tottenham argued that the team could bring him to London because of a buyout option.  

As the negotiations were likely to collapse, Woong-jung said he loudly demanded the Leverkusen general manager resume talks. 

“The [Leverkusen] head coach did not trust Heung-min. I had no reason to stay with the head coach who distrusted my son,” Woong-jung said. Heung-min in his autobiography also said he was “inclined toward Tottenham” for the same reasons.

Leverkusen’s coach at the time was Roger Schmidt. Now with Portuguese team Benfica, Schmidt could not be reached for comment on the elder Son’s remarks. Benfica FC and Leverkusen FC did not respond to requests for comment from Nikkei.  

According to Son senior, Leverkusen was embarrassed and let Heung-min go for 22 million pounds ($26.2 million), more than twice their initial reported investment of 10 million euros.  

Tottenham signed a five-year deal with Son in August 2015, sending him on his way to the top of the Premier League. His speed, explosive sprinting, and ball control set him apart at Tottenham, while his teamwork, particularly with forward Kane, has been widely praised. He had 98 total goals in the Premier League as of last week, putting him in 34th place in the league for career goals. 

Despite his success abroad, Son keeps close ties to South Korea. In 2018, he established a football academy in his hometown of Chuncheon, which cost around $14 million, most of which Son contributed himself. So far, two graduates of the Son Football Academy, Choi In-woo, 20, and 21-year-old Ryu Dong-wan, have been recruited by German clubs.

Asian superstar

While there have been hundreds of South American superstars in Europe and dozens from Africa that have been eagerly recruited by clubs, there have been comparatively few Asian players.

The sport is relatively new in Asia: South Korea got its first professional league in 1983, 95 years after England. Japan followed a decade later. It has taken time for the continent to develop the strong foundations necessary to produce a consistent stream of talented players.

The region’s women have had much more success abroad. China’s women reached the World Cup final in 1999 and Japan became world champion in 2011, while players such as Ji So-yun of South Korea and Japan’s Saki Kumagai have had long careers at the top of the European game. 

It has taken Asia’s men longer to show they can compete at the very top.

When stars from Japan, South Korea and China first started heading to the West in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was suspicion that European clubs were less interested in their skills than in the perceived commercial benefits from Asian merchandise sales, sponsorships and broadcasting deals. 

“For a while, many European football clubs didn’t understand Asian markets and therefore took a very transactional approach to market entry,” said Simon Chadwick, professor of Sport and Geopolitics at SKEMA Business School in France. “This explains the rather simplistic ‘sign a player’ approach that clubs often used. I think the situation has largely changed now.”

The attitudes were entrenched for some time. In 2003, Harchester United, the fictional team featured in the long-running U.K. television drama "Dream Team," signed a Chinese player named Zhao Qiang in a bid to become the most popular English club in China. However, the player was portrayed as not having the ability to play in the league. 

Yet fiction was not always that far from reality, especially when a number of the first Asian arrivals struggled for playing time. Junichi Inamoto left Japan for London giant Arsenal in 2001, but the international midfielder never started a league game for the team. He went on to find moderate success at Fulham.

Goals drive sales

In 2004, another English club, Everton, thought it was signing Chinese player Li Tie as part of a deal with its sponsor, the now defunct Chinese electronics company Kejian, and was surprised when a different player, Li Weifeng, arrived instead and played just once in the Premier League. Li Tie came later and fared better. In the same year, Manchester United signed China’s Dong Fangzhou in a deal potentially worth over $4 million, but the winger also played just once. 

But it was those who had success on the pitch who made the most difference off it. South Korean Park Ji-sung, who played for Manchester United, was both a talented player and a marketing juggernaut. In 2006, the club launched a branded credit card with South Korea’s Shinhan Bank and issued over 600,000 cards within nine months. 

In 2012, after Park made his 200th appearance in all competitions for Manchester United, he addressed those who claimed he had been bought primarily for commercial reasons. “Some people did say those things when I came here. Now no one says it. I am very happy that I proved Asian players can deal with the high levels of European football.”

Hidetoshi Nakata was another success story, after moving from the Japanese League to the Italian team of Perugia in 1998. The midfielder, described as the Japanese David Beckham in terms of his fashion style, looks and popularity, more than held his own on the pitch before retiring at the relatively young age of 29 to brew sake. After moving to Roma in 2000, Nakata helped the team become Italian champion the following year. 

Son may not have won a league championship with Tottenham, but he has exceeded the exploits of Nakata and Park. “He is probably the first Asian attacking star who has played at a world-class level for nearly a decade,” Beijing-based sports consultant Bi Yuan told Nikkei Asia. “He has also reached a level that no other Asian player has been close to: winning the Golden Boot in arguably the best league in the world. He has shown that Asia can produce an attacking superstar like South America and Africa.”

His exploits on the field have helped to show European clubs that commercial benefits in Asia materialize when Asian players are good enough to hold their own, according to experts such as Mike Wragg, managing director for Nielsen Sports Asia Pacific Business. Nielsen estimates there are already 546.5 million football fans in Asia, with the Premier League attracting 386.9 million followers there.

Son’s success, Wragg said, is “a significant part of making Tottenham a more sellable sponsorship property, and has driven the fan base as well, not just the fact he is an Asian player.”

Tackling racism

Appealing to foreign markets and foreign players means tackling the legacy of racism that has been rife in European football for decades. Black players have long had to contend with racist attacks -- it is not unheard of for fans to throw bananas onto the pitch when black players take to the field. 

Anti-Asian hate is also nothing new. In 2006, Seol Ki-hyeon, who was playing for Reading as one of the first East Asian players in the Premier League at the time, told British media: "I've been getting racially abused for a while. It is easier to pick on me because I am one of the very few Asians in the league.

"There shouldn't be a place for racist name-calling in England, but what can you do? I hope it stops."

Racist attacks from the stands may have decreased since Seol’s era, due to the onset of harsh penalties, but the vestige of racism in British football is still evident online. 

After the Feb. 19 game against West Ham, for example, Tottenham reported several episodes of racist abuse targeted at Son on social media sites, and quickly called on social media companies to crack down harder on abuse.

“We have been made aware of the utterly reprehensible online racist abuse directed at Heung-min Son during today’s match, which has been reported by the Club,” Tottenham said in a statement. “We stand with Sonny and once again call on the social media companies and authorities to take action.” 

Kick It Out, an anti-discrimination advocacy group partnered with the Premier League and England’s Football Association, echoed Tottenham’s concerns.

“The longer it takes social media companies to take action, or the government to pass the online safety bill, the more players will be abused,” a representative for Kick It Out told Nikkei. “Are players just expected to take the abuse while we wait for reform?” 

In June 2020, the Premier League launched an online reporting system to address online racist abuse toward players, managers, match officials and their families. In the 12 months to March 2022, more than 400 cases of abuse, reported by fans via clubs’ websites, were investigated by the league, with some resulting in legal action. 

In February 2021, the Premier League launched its “No Room For Racism” action plan, which aims to work with clubs, player organizations, fan groups, police and schools to reduce racism nationwide. The campaign’s goals include increasing the proportion of black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in the Premier League’s workforce -- currently 16.5% -- and providing anti-racism educational materials to elementary schools across England and Wales.

Son features in one “No Room for Racism” promotional video, chanting the slogan, “There’s no room for racism, anywhere,” alongside other players from various ethnic backgrounds.

Otherwise, Son mostly refrains from making public comments on racism, but said in a 2019 South Korean documentary about his life, titled “Son-sational,” that playing well on the pitch was the best response to racist attacks. 

He singled out his time in Germany for criticism, telling reporters that his excellent performance in South Korea’s 2018 World Cup match against Germany was fueled by the racism he experienced there as a teenager.

“I went to Germany when I was a child … [and] went through an incredibly tough time,” he told reporters in Seoul in 2022. “I also experienced racism many times. I thought I should avenge them some time,” Son said. An explosive 2-0 victory knocked the German team out of the World Cup in the group stages. 

The Son effect

Son’s presence at Tottenham has dramatically altered the economics of the game. Fans of Tottenham in South Korea, more than 8,000 kilometers from the London club’s home ground, outnumber fans in the U.K. at 12.73 million compared to 7.49 million, according to an average of surveys in 2022 by Nielsen Fan Insights. The club’s website even has a Korean language edition.

Dan Plumley, senior lecturer in Sport Finance at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K., said of Son: “He is obviously a phenomenal footballer, but also [the club] have realized the value that he has to them in that marketplace and that's a huge thing for Spurs."

In July 2022, after Tottenham Hotspur chose South Korea for their first international preseason tour since the pandemic, 66,000 tickets for a game at Seoul World Cup Stadium sold out in 25 minutes. Photographs of Son featured front and center in promotional material, and the club proudly billed itself as “the most watched and best-supported overseas soccer team in the country.”

These tours can provide an estimated $12 million to $18 million in revenue for a club like Spurs, from ticket sales for the matches, fan engagement and events off the pitch, Plumley said.

However, nobody knows what will happen to Tottenham’s following and commercial appeal in South Korea and the rest of Asia when Son leaves the London club, either in 2025 when his current contract expires or sooner, if a rival club makes a move.

Unlike older generations, younger fans tend to follow the player, not the team. There are clues to be found in the case of Ryu Hyun-jin.

When the left-handed South Korean Major League Baseball pitcher moved to the Toronto Blue Jays from the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2020, many South Koreans dropped the Dodgers to follow Ryu. The Dodgers were once called South Korea’s “national club” in the Major League, but now few follow the team.

A sample of South Korean fans reveals much loyalty to Son, but little toward his team. Park Chan-wook, a retired hotel general manager from Ilsan, said: “Of course, I support Tottenham because Son plays there. I don’t think I will support Tottenham if Son leaves. I supported Man U when Park Ji-sung played there. But I support Tottenham now when it plays against Man U.”

Tottenham needs to be planning what it will do when Son does depart, according to Chadwick, the sports and geopolitics professor in France. “Evidence increasingly now shows that fans primarily engage with players, especially when fans are drawn from the GenZ and GenAlpha groupings.” Chadwick believes it is inevitable that, when Son leaves London, some fans at least will leave with him. 

A problem for Tottenham, perhaps, but not for the player: “What is important,” Chadwick said, “is that Son continues being Son, an incredible ambassador for himself, football, and his country.”

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