The South Korean striker Son Heung-min helped lead Tottenham into the Champions League final against Liverpool. Photo / Getty Images
Persistent stereotypes about Asian players obscure the quality of Tottenham Hotspur's Son Heung-min, a star by any metric.
A half-hour or so after Tottenham Hotspur had edged Manchester City in the first leg of their Champions League quarterfinal, the club's box-fresh stadium was all but empty.
Only a handful of fans remained in their seats, gazing out on to the field, not quite ready to leave. A few of them clutched the Taegukgi, the flag of South Korea. Others had it painted on their faces. A few more had replica jerseys adorned with the number seven. Most of them, one way or another, had made it abundantly clear that they had come to see Son Heung-min.
It had been a good night for Son, in the middle of a good month. A week earlier, he had scored the first goal in Tottenham's new stadium. Against City, it was his late strike that gave Mauricio Pochettino's team a narrow victory.
Six days later, Son would score twice more to send Spurs on their way past mighty Manchester City and into the semifinals, where, after a stunning result at Ajax, he and his teammates got to celebrate Spurs' breathless, unexpected progression to its first Champions League final.
Son has long been an icon to those fans who make the journey from his native South Korea to see him in action. In Europe, though, it is different.
There has never been any doubt about his talent, ever since he first arrived at Hamburg, in Germany, as a teenager. "He was a star," said Roger Schmidt, one of his coaches at Bayer Leverkusen, Son's second Bundesliga team. "It was not just Leverkusen fans that loved him; it was fans of lots of clubs." Pochettino first tried to sign Son when he was still coaching Southampton. Last summer, Bayern Munich expressed an interest in taking him back to Germany.
But it was not until this season — and, in reality, until those few weeks when he went supernova — that England, and Europe, started to afford Son the star treatment: the forward whose absence is worth fretting about, the player who might lead his team to the Champions League title, the subject of countless long-form profiles in half a dozen languages. A few days before the game against Liverpool in which he might cement his place as a global superstar, it is worth asking why.
In the summer of 2013, Bayer Leverkusen was short a principal sponsor. The club's deal with the solar energy provider Sunpower had expired, and it was struggling to find a replacement. That June, at a cost of 10 million euros (about $11.1 million), it signed Son from Hamburg. It was the most expensive transfer in the club's history.
In August of that year, Leverkusen agreed to a three-year deal with LG, the South Korean electronics firm, to plaster its name on team jerseys. Under the terms of the arrangement, Son would become a brand ambassador for LG Electronics.
European soccer has long seen players from East Asia as one of two things. One is, essentially, as a marketing strategy: a way not simply of winning the hearts and minds of the vast audience available in Japan, South Korea and, especially, China, but of attracting sponsors from those markets, too.
The other perception is, perhaps, best illustrated by the case of Park Ji-sung, the former Manchester United midfielder who remains, until Saturday, the only Korean player ever to feature in a Champions League final.
"I remember going to see a game in Seoul when Park was playing for Manchester United," said Lim Hyun-joo, a senior lecturer in sociology at Bournemouth University. "Park was seen as a good player in England, but in many ways he was invisible. I was shocked by the reception in Korea: all the people went crazy for him. It was a complete contrast."
Park spent seven years at Old Trafford, and was held in high esteem both by fans and by his manager, Alex Ferguson, who regularly called on him in the highest-profile games. Park's virtues were not necessarily related to his talents, though: He was cherished for his industry, his energy, his discipline. He would often be tasked with man-marking the opposition's biggest threat.
It was a case study of how Europe views Asian players: they might sell jerseys and tickets and sponsorship deals off the field, but on it, they are — first and foremost — good workers.
When Son signed for Tottenham, in 2016 — the same year LG ended its sponsorship deal with Leverkusen — he described his style of play as "bold and daring." His agent, Thies Bliemeister, recalled visiting him as a teenager at Hamburg, and being impressed that he was "never inside, playing PlayStation with the other guys: he was always outside, practicing, learning." Schmidt said Son would spend hours alone on the training ground, refining his shooting, perfecting his accuracy with either foot, first from inside the box and then just outside, over and over.
And yet, for a long time, what people — even those who worked with him closely — noticed most about Son was how hard he worked. "He is indefatigable," Pochettino said of him this season. He compared him to the Energiser bunny: "He never gives up. He tries, he tries again and again."
To Lim, there is a resonance in the way Europe treats its Asian soccer players with the way the United States has sometimes viewed its Asian immigrant communities. "It is the idea of the model minority," she said. "The coverage of Son that I've read has focused a lot on his hard work, his discipline, his filial piety.
"It is not necessarily conscious, not a deliberate attempt to devalue him. But there is a way of looking at Korean or Japanese players that is the construction of an Asian masculine subject through the lens of the stereotype of the 'obedient citizen.'"
It is not, Lim points out, necessarily a negative image. And it is not, in Son's case, wrong. Bliemeister has known him for more than a decade and speaks of him with genuine affection: "a funny, positive guy, happy to learn, respectful to his coaches." Son was, Bliemeister said, so determined to make himself a success in Europe that he learned German by watching episodes of "SpongeBob SquarePants."
But nonetheless, the discussion around him often plays into a stereotype. The idea of the model minority "denies individual quality and erases individual experience," Lim said. It means that it has been hard to think of Son as a superstar, because the language we use to describe him is not the same as the language we use for a superstar. Superstars do more than work hard.
Almost 10 years ago, Apertura Sports noticed a gap in soccer's transfer market. More and more German clubs were looking to expand into Asia, hoping to win fans and commercial backing in Japan, South Korea and — in particular — China. The quickest route to a vast new audience seemed to be importing a player, a local hero, but few teams had the familiarity or expertise to recruit with much confidence. Apertura decided to be the bridge.
"We recruited a scout, a guy who once played for the German under-21 team and spoke good Mandarin," said Johannes Graf Strachwitz, one of Apertura's founders. "We sent him round China for months to look for players, but he could not find anyone who was of the standard to play in the Bundesliga. The quality is key: They have to be good enough to play.
"Eventually, he came back and said he had found two. We were so relieved. He said that there was a catch: They weren't Chinese, they were Korean."
Apertura, working in partnership with agents in Korea, took on the two players, and started to pitch them to various German clubs. The reaction was hardly effusive. "A lot of clubs were not really responsive," Strachwitz said. "They kind of waved the idea of signing Koreans off."
Europe's scepticism about Asian players — that they were either good workers, or highly-paid billboards — was deep-seated. In 2003, long before Apertura found its first two Korean players, Lee Young-pyo, a star of the Korean squad at the 2002 World Cup, joined the Dutch team PSV Eindhoven. So did Park, his international teammate.
Lee knew he had the faith of his coach: PSV's Guus Hiddink had, after all, guided that South Korea team to the World Cup semifinals. "He knew me well," Lee said. "However, my teammates had different thoughts about me."
By his own estimation, it took him a year or so to win them over. He can date it almost exactly: on Oct. 24, 2004, Lee scored one goal and created another in a 2-0 win against Ajax. "I had to face the stereotype of an Asian player, and it took quite a time to prove my ability to my fellow teammates," he said. "I was finally able to break it in that game."
Stereotypes, though, take a while to shift. Son's becoming the first Korean player to score in a Champions League final would not automatically override decades of preconceptions about what Asian players can and cannot do: Apertura, after all, still found clubs steadfastly resistant to Korean imports years after Lee and Park had helped PSV to the semifinals of the Champions League.
But with every season that passes, Apertura's phones get a little busier. There are still genuine structural obstacles to Asian players traveling to Europe, following in Son's footsteps — the distance for one, but also FIFA regulations governing the transfer of minors and the fact that much of youth soccer in Korea is played in schools rather than specialized academies — but more and more clubs are taking an interest in Korean, and Japanese, players, Strachwitz said. "It is starting to grow year on year," he said.
The stereotype persists, though. Even now, Apertura finds that clubs have a "specific idea" of the type of player they might find in Asia. "They see them as dedicated, reliable, hardworking, respectful of older people, and therefore never a problem for a coach," Strachwitz said.
In Son's case, of course, that is all true. It is just that it does not begin to do justice to the full range of his abilities as a player. His outstanding quality is not that he is reliable, or dedicated, or hard-working. The longer he demonstrates that, the more likely it is that clubs will start to disregard it, that they will look in Korea and Japan not just for disciplined workers, for obedient citizens, but for potential superstars, too. Son is still subject to the stereotype. In time, he may yet be the man to break it.
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