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Where would Tottenham be without Son Heung-min?
With eight goals in seven games this season, after scoring in Sunday’s 3-3 draw with West Ham, it’s no wonder Spurs are looking to secure the 28-year-old’s future with a new deal.
Signed to modest fanfare for £ 22 million from Bayer Leverkusen in 2015, in part to help lighten Harry Kane’s scoring load, Son has gone from being a good player to one of the best in the Premier League.
But only when the numbers are laid bare does the importance of South Korea to José Mourinho’s team become fully apparent.
And with their increase in performance comes the increasing advantage of exposure in the Asian market, with research showing there are more Tottenham fans in the nation of Son than in the UK.
Here’s why Son is crucial for Spurs, who start their Europa League campaign on Thursday, on and off the pitch.
For the team: goals and victories
Son, along with Kane, has become the Spurs’ favorite man.
His productivity when it comes to goal contributions has grown steadily in each of the five seasons he has completed with Tottenham.
In his debut campaign, he scored or assisted 15% of all Tottenham goals, while last season he had risen to a remarkable 33%, scoring 18 and assisting 11, even topping Kane’s contribution of 30%.
So far this season he has contributed eight goals and four assists, participating in 43% of Spurs’ 28 goals (Kane is at a remarkable 65%), and in his overall career at Tottenham he has been involved in little more than a quarter of the club’s 543 goals.
Investment company Carteret Analytics, which provides information to some Premier League clubs on potential signings, has recorded Son’s growing influence for Spurs.
Son’s Carteret Index, a measure of his contribution to winning games, grew from 243.1 in 2017-18 to 307.2 in 2019-20, with Kane the only Spurs player to score higher last season.
By comparison, Lionel Messi’s rating last season was 418.2 and if there was any doubt about how impressive Son’s start to this campaign has been, he is currently rated at 526.7, although he would be expected to level with just five. Premier League games. of data to analyze so far.
For himself – 25th best player in the world
Son came in relatively unknown to English football fans when he moved from Bayer Leverkusen five years ago.
The Global Player Index, a ranking of Nielsen’s Gracenote and Hypercube players based on what happens when they’re on the field, ranked Son the 137th best player in the world when he landed in North London.
In May 2017 he became a fixture in the top 100 and this week, after his performance against West Ham, he peaked as the 25th best player in the world, according to the ranking.
It is an improvement that can be measured by his competition in front of goal.
Gracenote’s metrics say Son, given the opportunities that have come his way in front of goal, has scored more goals than expected each season since joining Spurs.
In that time, Gracenote says he has outperformed goals by 37% (60 scored, 43.66 expected); only Eden Hazard has performed better in the top five leagues in Europe in the last five years (48 scored, 32.69 expected).
But his start to the season has been something special, scoring seven times on occasions worth 2.99 goals, a performance of over 134%.
The intrinsic value of Carteret de Son, which measures how much a player is worth to his club based on his performance, has increased from 38.2 million pounds in 2017-18 to 75.1 million pounds, just 3.4 million pounds. pounds less than Kane.
By country: the Spurs boom in South Korea
Adding all this up, a player who was already a star in his home country when he joined the Spurs becomes an icon among his compatriots.
A recent Nielsen Fan Insights poll found that more than 21% of South Koreans considered Tottenham their favorite foreign soccer team, equivalent to 11 million people aged 16 to 69, and more Spurs fans in the world. United Kingdom.
Manchester United are the second most popular foreign team in the country, supported by 6.1%, after being pushed to second place by Spurs in 2018.
All of this additional business potential has been driven by Son, in an interest that the Spurs barely registered in South Korea before his arrival and the club’s popularity is not as strong in any other Asian nation.
It is all stacking up nicely for Tottenham, with Son delivering results on the field and expanding markets outside of it, and it will undoubtedly increase the North London club’s desire to keep him beyond his current contract in 2023.
Source: bbc.com
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