If you looked closely, you might have noticed that Tottenham Hotspur attacker Son Heung-Min was sporting a brace on two of the fingers on his right hand. If you didn’t notice, that’s okay — I didn’t either. It was easy to miss and nobody really commented on it at the time.
But why though? Apparently because Sonny, as captain, tried to break up a fight between members of his own national team over a dispute about ping-pong while away with the Republic of Korea at the Asian Cup.
I wish I were making this up.
The story was first reported in the odious scandal rag The S-n, but it’s since been corroborated by several other sources, including Alasdair Gold in Football.London who used South Korean football journalist Sungmo Lee as a source.
Here’s what apparently happened: before South Korea’s loss to Jordan in the Asian Cup semifinal, some younger members of the Korea squad including PSG striker Lee Kang-In left a team dinner early to play some ping-pong, which rankled a number of the older members of the team. As Korea captain, Son was called upon to entice the players back to the table for team bonding, and there were disrespectful words directed at Son. Fisticuffs ensued between the elder and younger generations within the squad, and Sonny ended up dislocating his finger trying to break up the fight. According to Gold, Son’s finger hurt so much that he warned Tottenham not to try and shake his hand when he got back to London. It’s not clear whether Sonny was actually fighting with Lee, but he was definitely involved to the extent that he got injured in the process.
That’s all unwell and bad, but there’s another “Us Weekly” level to this story as well — Korea’s loss in the semifinals was nigh catastrophic to the KFA’s image inside the country, with most of the ire directed at manager Jurgen Klinsmann and KFA president Chung Mong-gyu. The story of the ping-pong fight was leaked and became huge news in South Korea. Tottenham hasn’t (and likely won’t) comment on what happened to its club captain, but the KFA did acknowledge that there was a “disagreement” within the Korean squad ahead of the semifinal.
The Us Weekly part is that — according to journalist Sungmo Lee — the news of the altercation may have been leaked after Korea’s loss in order to deflect attention away from Klinsmann and Chung and onto the players, painting a picture of a team in discord and giving the fans something else to think about other than the management and overall leadership of the Korean national team.
“While the KFA admitted that there was an issue among Korean players including Son and Lee Kang-in, it was very weird that the story broke out from foreign media and then the KFA admitted the story right away. Considering the timing and circumstances, Korean fans and media suspected that maybe the KFA was trying to turn people’s attention from Klinsmann and themselves to Son and Lee’s issue as they are the two biggest football stars in South Korea right now.”
Yowza. This isn’t the first time that Sonny’s been involved in KFA-related drama. Last year Son was engaged with some Grade A Prime beef with Bayern Munich central defender Kim Min-jae on social media over Kim’s desire to take a break from national team duty, and as captain Sonny regularly and actively shoulders the responsibility for Korea’s supposed underperformance on the national stage. But this is a whole different level.
I don’t know how much we should read into it, though. Sonny is by all accounts an outstanding teammate — it’s why he was made Spurs club captain after Harry Kane left for Germany. This, and past incidents, make it sound like the KFA is just kind of a toxic workplace environment. Going into major tournaments with outsized and unreasonable expectations and having to bear the brunt of perceived failures doesn’t sound like much fun, and the one side we’ve heard about this latest issue does make it sound like Lee Kang-In was being kind of a dick. (That said, Lee did apologize unreservedly for his actions on social media, calling Sonny his “older brother.)
All that’s to say — let’s just keep Sonny in London for a while, yeah? It doesn’t sound like Korean football is an especially healthy place to be right now.