Tottenham's Son keeps proving he can be soccer's first Asian superstar
If we’re being honest, the list of winners of the AFC Asian International Player of the Year award makes for sorry reading. Not that it’s populated by bad players or anything. It’s just that it underscores Asia’s ongoing search for a true soccer superstar.
Since 2012, the award has been split into a prize for the best Asian playing on a different continent and the best Asian-based player. Even the former category has delivered only very good players, but none who have been the face of a major team. Last season, Makoto Hasebe of Eintracht Frankfurt won it. In 2015 and 2017, Tottenham’s Heung-min Son claimed the prize. Other recent winners were Shinji Okazaki, Mile Jedinak, Yuto Nagatomo and Shinji Kagawa.
Good players all, but hardly standouts.
In fact, Kagawa was a bust for Manchester United, the club he played for when he won it. Nagatomo, a fullback, won it with Inter Milan while the team was in the depths of a multi-year crisis, knocked well off its pedestal in Italy. Jedinak is a workaday midfielder who played for a perennially relegation-threatened Crystal Palace. Okazaki came off the bench for Leicester City when it won the Premier League. And Hasebe spent most of his career in Germany as a very serviceable but unspectacular defensive midfielder — the award appearing like more of a lifetime achievement prize for his larger body of work. Go back further in the award’s history and the résumés become thinner still.
Which leaves Son, the South Korean forward who literally played his way out of having to complete his nation’s military service by winning the Asian Games with his under-23 national team. (The entire team was excused as its reward.)
For most of his career, the 26-year-old has been a valued attacker, who can play just about any role up front, and appreciated by both his teams and fans. But he’s never truly been the focal player. Not at Hamburg, not at Bayer Leverkusen and, for the past four seasons, not at Tottenham. He’s always been overshadowed. Or underexposed, perhaps.
Partly, the lack of appreciation likely stems from his origins. Son isn’t seen as a big star because fans and media aren’t predisposed to seeing an Asian player that way. Because there’s never been one before. That’s how perceptions in soccer work: a confirmation bias pervades everything. And partly, Son is once again crowded out by some of the players around him. Harry Kane, Dele Alli and Christian Eriksen hoover up all the attacking plaudits on that team, leaving little of it for Son, who doesn’t always start – never mind that he has already posted a dozen or more league goals for a third season running.
But in the first leg of Spurs’ Champions League quarterfinals, Kane was injured again, further derailing and possibly ending a season beset by physical ailments. And in the second leg, the bonkers 4-3 affair that saw Spurs squeak past Manchester City on aggregate away goals, it was clear that Kane’s absence has again re-cast Son into a central role, just as it did earlier in the season. Son responded by scoring twice in the first 11 minutes, keeping his team in the game as City ran riot early on Wednesday.
Spurs were 5-0-0 this season when Kane was missing going into Wednesday’s game. And the last time Son had to step in as the primary goalscorer in Kane’s absence, he scored four times in four games. Now, then, Son seems to have an opportunity to push his club to its first Champions League final against underdogs Ajax. And if he does, if he thrives again when asked to put his team on his back, he could finally become that first Asian superstar.
There won’t be any more denying Heung-min Son’s excellence.
So it’s sort of ironic that on Saturday, in a Premier League rematch with City — or a re-rematch? — Son will play opposite the Citizens’ own unlikely breakout player, Raheem Sterling.
Certainly, Sterling was already an England regular and a pillar in City’s attack. But this season, he has not only become an unlikely voice against racism in the game, but perhaps also the best player in the Premier League.
At long last, Sterling has become more efficient in front of goal and grown into the enormous potential he always had. He, too, scored two goals amid those Champions League fireworks on Wednesday. And that’s just about rehabilitated his image of the petulant child star who was interested in only money. It was an image shaped by the media, but even one of his teammates saw him that way.
Sterling will seek to lead City back to the top of the table in pursuit of a second straight league title.
Son is chasing something much bigger.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist and a sports communication lecturer at Marist College. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
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