Son Heung-min’s unusual path to becoming one of the Premier League’s best players South Korean star is fast becoming indispensable to Tottenham as he reaps the rewards of a football education steered by his driven father

Growing up in Chuncheon, capital of South Korea’s Gangwon Province, Son Heung-min was not allowed to play for a competitive club until he was 16 years old.

His father, Woong-jung, was determined Son would not make the same mistakes which ended his own playing career at 28 with an Achilles injury.

Woong-jung did not believe the emphasis on running and fitness at youth teams across South Korea were the right approach, and did not want his son to experience the harsh coaching, which often crossed the border into bullying, that he was subjected to. Nor did he believe it was beneficial to developing young footballers.

So father and Son worked together in a punishing regime focused around repetitive drills of the football basics: touch, control, dribbling, passing. It is why Son now is such a consistent player on the ball.

Only much later did Woong-jung introduce shooting and the practices could involve a thousand identical shots with one foot, then a thousand with the other.

At 16, Son finally joined a professional academy, but was not long at FC Seoul, the country’s biggest club, before he was snapped up by Bundesliga side Hamburg. His father travelled with him to Germany and during Son’s trial period would wake him up in the morning to insist on doing weight sessions together before training.

Epitome of a Poch player

By all accounts, Woong-jung was a strict father and for a lot of 16-year-olds the prospect of a parent pumping iron next to them in the gym might seem a tad intense. But the forward refers to his father as his idol and mentor, and, a decade on and worth several millions, he still lives, essentially, at home with his parents: in an apartment in Barnet, not far from Tottenham’s Enfield training centre.

Woong-jung has constantly been by his son’s side, advising in career decisions but always respecting Son having the final say. He signed for Spurs almost a year to the day Mauricio Pochettino joined the club from Southampton. At the south coast club, Pochettino and head of recruitment Paul Mitchell had already tried to sign him as a striker from Hamburg.

In many ways, Son is the epitome of a Pochettino player: a combination of supreme talent and uber tenacity. Pochettino always saw Son as somebody who had played under managers of a similar philosophy, including the coaching of Woong-jung, so when, following a disappointing first season, he asked to leave, the Argentinian refused. In a discussion with Mitchell, who had joined Pochettino at Spurs and brought Son in, they came to the decision to give him more time.

Cap and sunglasses

Pochettino told the player to change his negative mentality and challenged him to overcome the obstacles of playing elite level Premier League football, and with constant pushing and finding the right timing to play him, Son excelled. That season, he twice won Player of the Month as Spurs finished league runners-up for the first time in half a century.

The humility which people who know Son always cite as a defining feature of his character is even more impressive considering how famous he is back home. When his former club Bayer Leverkusen toured South Korea, his team-mates realised just how popular he was when he visited a shopping mall and 30,000 people turned up, a group which could fill most stadiums in England. Visiting home in the summer, Son finds it difficult to walk around and will wear a cap and sunglasses to hide his face.

Hard to leave out

At Spurs, i was told on Thursday, he is said never to complain about training sessions or if he is chosen for the bench instead of the starting XI. Only in recent weeks — in the absence of the injured Harry Kane and Dele Alli, both ahead of him the pecking order — has Son completely risen to the fore, with four goals in each of his four games since returning from playing in the Asian Cup, coinciding with four wins, keeping them in the title race and on the verge of reaching the Champions League quarter-finals.

Perhaps the lack of ego is why he has found himself on the bench when Kane and Alli are fit and Pochettino needs more defensive balance. As Sir Alex Ferguson would say of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, he was often the forward not in the starting line-up simply because he knew Solskjaer would not come banging on his office door.

The decision to leave Son out is becoming increasingly harder to make with every game.