In the summer of 2015, after ending their interest in Saido Berahino, Tottenham Hotspur turned their attention to Son Heung-min of Bayer Leverkusen.
The move wasn’t an immediate vote-winner with the Spurs support. This was a player with zero Premier League experience, coming into a new competition at the age of 23 and having never scored more than 12 league goals in a single season (Berahino had just scored 14 in the Premier League).
Seven years on, though, and there’s no doubt about Son’s value to his club.
The South Korea international celebrates his 30th birthday as a reigning Premier League Golden Boot winner, and has surpassed plenty of people’s expectations.
Son’s European journey began in his teens, and it was a former Tottenham favourite who helped him establish himself at Hamburg. Rafael van der Vaart returned to the Bundesliga club upon leaving Spurs in 2012, spending a second spell at Volksparkstadion, and the two players developed a near-immediate rapport.
“He was like a little boy at the time, barely out of his teens,” Van der Vaart told The Athletic in 2021. “I saw straight away that I need to play with him because I thought that us as a combination we could win some games. And that’s what we did.
Van der Vaart wasn’t the only Dutchman who helped, though. When Son was still a teenager, he was able to learn from the then-veteran Ruud van Nistelrooy after the Dutchman joined from Real Madrid.
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"Ruud van Nistelrooy helped me a lot,” Son said in 2016, as reported by ESPN . He saw my first training session and he talked to me. He told me I was a good player.
“He gave me confidence and I want to thank him for that. We had a really good team and were successful for a time with him.
That 2012-13 campaign, Son’s last for the club, saw Hamburg do the double over Jurgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund, themselves reigning Bundesliga champions and on their way to the Champions League final. Son scored twice in each victory, to the point that his efforts were impossible to ignore.
Son and Artjoms Rudnevs finished that season at the top of the scoring charts for Hamburg, with Son himself explaining how happy he and his teammate were for each other when finding the net. However, after the South Korea star left at the end of the season, his teammate never managed to post anything like the same numbers again.
In two seasons with Leverkusen, Son took things up a level. He scored his first Champions League goals for the club, including a match-winning double away to Zenit St Petersburg, and also began to cement his place in the South Korea national team.
Hong Myung-bo’s team were eliminated in the group stage of the 2014 World Cup without winning a game. However, Son’s goal at that tournament - coupled with two more in Russia in 2018 - mean he can become his country’s all-time top scorer in World Cup finals matches if he nets in Qatar.
At club level, though, one of the highlights in Leverkusen colours came against his former club. Specifically, a hat-trick, in a 5-3 victory over Hamburg in November 2013.
"I told him during the week: 'I trust you. Clear your head,'" Leverkusen boss - and former Liverpool captain Sami Hyypia - said at the time [via Goal ]. "[Against Hamburg], he has shown that he is a giant."
The hat-trick was the first from a South Korean player in a top European League, and Son would flourish under Hyypia before the Finn left the club in April 2014, eventually joining Brighton. A year later Son would also head to England, where he faced a challenging first season.
When Son signed for Spurs, the London club hadn’t been enjoying the best of luck with big-money signings. Roberto Soldado and Paulinho had both floundered after joining in 2013, while the likes of David Bentley had struggled in previous years.
While Mauricio Pochettino’s side were flying in 2015-16, their new man wasn’t a huge part of it. After suffering an injury in the first half of the season, he found it tough to claw his way back into the side as the likes of Dele Alli and Erik Lamela thrived in supporting roles behind Harry Kane.
Back then, the prospect of potential military service was picked up by supporters, but the idea of him being missing wasn’t the end of the world. This would soon change, though, with Son excelling under Pochettino and his successors, even when things were tougher for the team as a whole.
By the time he helped South Korea win gold at the Asian Games in 2018, excusing him from an extended spell with the army, he had hit 39 goals in two seasons - more than any Spurs player aside from Kane. After expressing his pride at the reaction of his compatriots after the victory, he also made special mention of Pochettino for the Argentine’s role in helping him develop.
“He took a big risk on me to go for the Asian Games and when I returned he takes me in as if I never left,” Son said . “His attention to detail is unbelievable and that is why he is one of the best in the world.”
A spell of military training would follow , during the Premier League’s extended break at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. By then, though, Son had established himself as one of Spurs’ most important players and one of the best in the Premier League.
In the midst of all that was perhaps his finest moment in Tottenham colours. His goals against Manchester City in the 2018-19 Champions League quarter-final will always have a special place in Tottenham hearts, even if Spurs fell short of the trophy, but personal honours arrived thanks to a stunning goal against Burnley in December 2019.
After collecting the ball on the edge of his own penalty area, with four Clarets players approaching, Son drove forward with the ball. Further defenders closed him down, but none of them - nor goalkeeper Nick Pope - could deny him.
“After I scored the goal, I didn’t realise it was such an amazing goal,” he said after winning the award. “As soon as I realised after the game when I watched it again, I was thinking, ‘wow, this was something special’.”
Since then, though, Son has gone from being a scorer of great goals to simply a great goalscorer. The 22 he netted in all competitions in 2020-21 represented a personal high point, and he improved on that last term with 24 - with his 23 in the league seeing him share the golden boot with Mohamed Salah.
The surprising thing in all this time is that Spurs haven’t needed to fend off the bids one might expect for a player producing his numbers. Only Kane and Jermain Defoe have scored more goals for the London club in the Premier League era, and 13 goals this term would be enough for him to move into second spot on the list.
There were reports of potential interest from Liverpool, and Spurs might have been forced to deal with bids had they not secured a top-four finish on the final day of the season. It was largely thanks to Son that they sealed fourth, though, with goals against Leicester and Liverpool during the run-in helping Antonio Conte’s side pip rivals Arsenal to Champions League qualification.
Ahead of the 2022-23 season, Son’s importance to his team has never been more clear, and yet this is a summer in which the age of top-level footballers has come into sharp focus. With Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah both turning 30 over the course of a few months and moving in different directions, plenty have asked whether the age marks the start of a player’s decline or the start of some next-level numbers a la Karim Benzema or Robert Lewandowski.
As Son enters his fourth decade, similar questions may be asked about his longer-term future. However, after the last two seasons with Spurs, he may have cause to feel he has already answered them.
