Only Mohamed Salah has scored more goals in the English Premier League this season than the Spurs forward, thanks to a slight tactical shift.
It says a lot that on the day of Arsenal’s trip to Tottenham, the player the visitors are most afraid of is not Harry Kane, who has 11 goals in 14 games against them.
Instead, ahead of the most important North London Derby in years, Mikel Arteta’s forward partner will be giving him nightmares.
There is no higher compliment for Son Heung-min, whose 27 goals this season rank him second in the Premier League behind Mohamed Salah.
Twenty of those have been goals, making him the league’s top non-penalty goalscorer and leaves him just two behind Salah in the running for the Golden Boot.
Son has always been a little under-rated, his highlights reel and hard-working attitude for some reason failing to grab enough attention outside of Tottenham.
It is certainly strange that Son has not been the subject of record-breaking transfer bids in the same way that Kane has.
Finally, though, he is getting the attention he deserves thanks to those goalscoring numbers shooting up significantly over the last two years.
Across all competitions, his 21 goals this season is a joint-career high, level with his 2020-21 performance, but achieved in eight fewer matches.
The reason for Son’s improvements are largely tactical. Under a series of counterattacking managers, from Jose Mourinho through to Antonio Conte, Son’s role has changed significantly from the days when he was part of a possession-centric side, and Tottenham’s new way of playing is better suited to the South Korean’s skill set.
Beginning with Mourinho and taken up, with wildly different success rates, by Nuno Espirito Santo and Conte, Spurs have spent the last three years as a team with a deeper base line than most big clubs.
The focus is on making use of transitions – when the ball is turned over – to break quickly into space, as opposed to pressing high and focusing on dominating possession.
Although this is a rather broad description of what separates Mourinho, Nuno, and Conte from most other ‘Big Six’ managers such as Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel, or Arteta, it is a helpful way to appreciate how Son’s role has shifted.
Whereas under Mauricio Pochettino, when Son would expect to get hold of the ball in the final third, taking part in a longer phase of build-up play that means he is facing an opponent chiefly sat behind the ball, now he collects possession in deeper areas and is part of a three-pronged attack to counter at speed.
Naturally, this suits Son’s brilliant dribbling and acceleration, as well as his unusually high technical ability while running at pace.
And while Tuchel or Klopp, for example, would be equally keen to utilise these qualities, they would do so from high turnovers, not from the deeper shape that a succession of managers at Tottenham have deployed.
This is captured neatly in the statistics. As the table below shows, Son is passing longer and more vertically season on season, while the number of passes made while under pressure has dramatically reduced over the last two years.
| Progressive distance of passes, per 90 | Long passes completed, per 90 | Passes made while under pressure, per 90 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | 93.9 | 1.25 | 7.94 |
| 2018-19 | 87.6 | 1.67 | 7.36 |
| 2019-20 | 92.6 | 1.89 | 7.31 |
| 2020-21 | 93.8 | 2.54 | 5.92 |
| 2021-22 | 105.2 | 2.42 | 5.42 |
This points to instructions for Son to be more direct, but also to him receiving the ball in larger amounts of space.
That second point is crucial. With more space in which to work, and bearing down on the defence while on the counter, Son is far more productive.
The second part of the tactical shift from which Son has benefitted is the adapted role of Kane, something first started by Mourinho and (reluctantly) taken up by Conte.
Mourinho, never one to coach attacking players with much detail, gave Kane the freedom to do whatever he wanted, which led to Tottenham’s number 10 acting like one.
Initially Kane dropping deeper worked well for Mourinho, although over time it left them short on players in the final third.
Conte has gone on record saying he would like to sign a creative midfielder so that Kane can focus on playing as a striker, but for now he has embraced what Mourinho (then Nuno) discovered – albeit with greater tactical specificity.
What we see now is Son complimenting Kane’s movement by making runs on the shoulder of the last defender. Essentially the two players have swapped around, leaving Son as the de facto number nine.
| Shot accuracy | Goals per shot on target | Distance per shot (metres) | Total goals | Expected goals (xG) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | 45.9% | 0.35 | 16.0 | 12 | 10.4 |
| 2018-19 | 37.8% | 0.43 | 18.9 | 12 | 7.6 |
| 2019-20 | 48.1% | 0.28 | 16.6 | 11 | 8.9 |
| 2020-21 | 51.5% | 0.46 | 17.0 | 17 | 10.3 |
| 2021-22 | 52% | 0.51 | 15.8 | 20 | 13.4 |
He scored four goals in 13 league games under Nuno this season (0.3 per game) and 17 goals in 29 (0.6 per game) under Conte.
Son has embraced this change and become a clinical centre forward in the process. Son’s shot accuracy has gone up – largely because he is taking them closer to goal – while he is out-performing his expected goals (xG) more spectacularly every year.
There is no doubt Son could perform at any club in the world, and indeed if he was given the chance at a more territorially dominant one such as Manchester City or Liverpool, his goalscoring numbers would likely be even higher given the added quality around him.
But in a Spurs shirt, Son is most comfortable in a tactical system that relies upon counterattacks; that gives him the ball in space, hurtling into the final third, and acting like a number nine from within a system designed by one of the world’s best tacticians.
