Son Heung-min is the best finisher in world football. In fact, he has been for the better part of a decade.
Where are his mountains of golden boots? Where are his Ballons D’Or? Where are all his trophies? Have you even watched Lionel Messi? These are all very good questions you might be inclined to throw back at this assertion, but it’s important to draw a distinction here between ‘best player’ or even ‘best goalscorer’ and ‘best finisher’.
The first is subjective of course (it’s still Messi, sorry), but when it comes to goals, one would be forgiven for concluding that the best finisher in the world over a given time period must surely also be the one with the most goals to his name in that period.
‘Son hasn’t even been the best goalscorer at his own club’, I hear you cry (that honour of course belongs to Harry Kane), let alone in world football, but in terms of the statistics at least, when it comes to the simple act of kicking a ball into the net when the opportunity presents itself, there is no man, not Kane, not Messi, not anybody, who does it as effectively as the South Korean.
Kane, as I mentioned, has indeed outscored Son since the latter joined Spurs in 2015, while setting up a lion’s share of his goals for good measure. As to why Kane has outscored Son, this comes down to a variety of factors, but I would say most prevalent of these are: the fact that Kane has played a much higher proportion of his games as a centre forward with Son playing mostly from the left, the fact that Kane has absolutely elite off-the-ball movement and reading of the game, allowing him better and more frequent chances to score, the fact Kane has been Spurs’ regular penalty taker (the filthy, stat-padding penalty merchant) and the fact that Kane is, in his own right and by any measure, also an outstanding finisher.
Meanwhile Lionel Messi has spent the entirety of the last fifteen years performing actual sorcery on a football pitch and making us all question the existence of a higher power and/or an extra-terrestrial presence here on Earth, while scoring a truly obscene number of goals, year after year.
I’m not here to tell you that Son is a better footballer than Messi or even Kane. His all-round game is far more one-dimensional than either of theirs. Where Son truly excels though, is in the consistency and quality of his chance conversion, in turning half-chances into real chances, in turning shots into goals, in turning water into wine.
Jesus, incidentally, for all his many talents with a football (yes, I’m talking about the Arsenal one now, keep up) can’t count clinical finishing among these and, in the exclusive club of top flight number 9s across Europe’s 'big 5' leagues, the Brazilian is in surprisingly abundant company.
Delving into the numbers...
Since the 2016/17 season, nobody has overperformed on their expected goals (xG) tally to the same degree as Son Heung-min in terms of percentages. What’s more is he has overperformed on his xG total in every single season from that campaign onwards. From 6-yard-box tap-ins to one-on-ones, to the 25-yard curling screamers to the Puskás award-winners, be it left foot or right foot (to the degree that one can barely work out which is even his strongest), Son’s repertoire of strikes, and the success with which he executes them, is simply unparalleled.
To quote Nicolai Kolov, Soviet diplomat and manager of Ivan Drago in ‘Rocky IV’: “It’s simple, whatever he hits – he destroys”.
So why has he not scored as many goals in the last couple of years as, say, Erling Haaland? The simple answer here, like with Kane, is in the availability of chances. As any overweight, middle-aged man, five pints deep at the pub will happily tell you – you put anyone, even them, up front for City and they’ll bag you a hatful of goals. While this is probably doing Haaland a slight disservice, it’s not wrong to say that simply playing for Guardiola’s Manchester City, and lurking between the posts, is enough to afford you a regular, healthy stream of goalscoring opportunities.
The big Norwegian broke the Premier League goalscoring record last season with his astounding tally of 36 goals. According to Understat, he did this from an xG total of 32.76, a small overperformance. This season, Haaland has performed below his xG total with his 14 goals having come from from 17.41 xG.
Statistically, Haaland is actually a relatively average to slightly-above-average finisher, with only negligible xG overperformances registered throughout his young career to date.
That's right, you heard me correctly; Erling Haaland – average.
Where he is far clear of average, however, is in his movement and anticipation, which though hard to tangibly assess, is plainly among the best in world football to anyone with eyes. He also performs significantly above average when it comes to being an unholy monstrous Viking Übermensch with an unrelenting thirst for hat-tricks and an almost unprecedented combination of speed, strength and size – essentially Ivan Drago in football boots (giving this article a massive overperformance on its expected Dragos).
This, combined with the fact that he essentially has the Harlem Globetrotters behind him all operating under the sole instruction of feeding him sitter after sitter, turns ‘slightly-above-average’ into ‘slightly unstoppable’.
Son, by contrast, spent most of last season not only carrying and recovering from an injury, but playing under a manager with a fatal allergy to the opposition’s third, in a side geared primarily towards feeding Harry Kane. In his Golden Boot-winning season a year earlier however, Son netted 23 times from an xG of 16.99, representing a 35.3% overperformance.
In other words, if 2021/22 Son was somehow instantaneously teleported into 2022/23 Erling Haaland’s place at the exact time of every single one of his shots on goal last season, the infallible rule of xG dictates that Son would have found the net 44 times. That’s prime Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo output.
Ok, this example is more than a bit silly but it hopefully gives you some context.
Consistency is key...
What’s really impressive in the case of Son is his consistency. Usually xG overperformance for a spell can be diagnosed as ‘just getting lucky’, a purple patch, inevitably destined to succumb to the law of averages and revert to the mean. Son’s teammate Richarlison, for example, is currently performing well above his xG total over the last 7 or 8 matches but this follows an extended period of falling short of his xG numbers. Spurs fans of course hope that this is simply the new Richarlison, but sadly, historical data suggests this level of performance simply shouldn't be sustainable.
Just looking at this season’s Premier League, Son leads the charts once again in terms of xG overperformance among the League’s leading scorers.
Of the 9 other players to have scored 10 goals or more at the time of writing, Son’s closest competition in terms of overperformance is his compatriot Hwang Hee-Chan, with a margin of 3.21 on his 6.91 xG (10 goals), compared with Son’s 4.53 over 7.47 (12 goals). Look back across Hwang’s career though, and you see an inconsistent record tracking against his expected figures, with this season representing something of an outlier.
Diogo Jota’s data (3.09 over 4.91) shows he has had a very clinical season in front of goal so far but, again, his numbers relative to expected have zig-zagged across his career. The same is true of Jarrod Bowen, Chris Wood and anyone with a relevant sample size, coming anywhere close to Son’s numbers.
Even Mohammed Salah has fallen either side of the line when comparing his goal tallies with his xG tallies over the years (admittedly with a Son-esque season in 2017/18, scoring 32 from 25.14 xG for a 6.86 overperformance) but that’s one season. The less said about Darwin Núñez in this arena, frankly, the better.
The Liverpool howler factory (Núñez) leads the charts this season for 'Big Chances Missed' in the Premier League, missing 20 to date (that's around 1 per match!). Second on that list, perhaps surprisingly, is Erling Haaland with 18. Ollie Watkins is next with 14. Alexander Isak has 12. These are all good forwards, you're probably thinking - and this is not unusual. In fact, the 3 Premier League players with the most 'Big Chances Missed' since records began are Sergio Agüero, Mohammed Salah and Harry Kane. Good forwards playing in good teams get a lot of good chances, and sometimes, despite what YouTube shows you, they miss.
That is except for Son; Son has missed just 3 'big chances' this season, despite being right up there among the golden boot contenders.
Another way to look at it is that while Haaland and Nunez are busy throwing as much as they can at the wall and hoping some sticks (and in Haaland's case, a lot does), Son is simply firing precise arrows cleanly into that same wall; he brings quality over quantity.
A lot of focus was on Harry Kane and Lionel Messi at the start of this piece, largely because both give Son some of his sternest competition in the field of xG over performance. Kane is over performing by 5.15 so far in his first year in Germany, after a 6.94 over performance last year and a staggering 9.18 back in 2016/17, but even he has balanced this out with seasons where he has fallen short.
Even the great Lionel Messi has registered inconsistent scores in this metric, despite twice outscoring his xG by more than 10 in a single season across this period (2018/19 and 2016/17). In fact Messi’s most outstanding goalscoring years came over a decade ago now, so fall outside of the timeframe we're examining, but for those wondering, in Leo's hallowed 2011-2013 goalscoring prime, he once scored a ridiculous 96 league goals against an xG of 64.1.
Lionel Messi is not human though, and in truth, at his peak at the turn of the last decade, he is the one man who eclipses Son's data in this area. This article isn't about him, however, it's about Son and more specifically, the last 10 years so we continue.
This chart of Understat data showcases a 5-year running total of xG percentage overperformance among some of Europe's leading scorers between the years of 2016 and 2021. As you can see, it isn't even close.
Interestingly, it shines a light on none other than Cristiano Ronaldo who, despite being arguably the greatest goalscorer the world has ever seen, has never been - as per the data - an exceptional finisher, counterintuitive and shocking as that might sound. According to Opta data, in the years from 2014/15 through 2022/23, Ronaldo only scored 4.6 more goals than he 'should have' based on his shots, compared to 33.1 by Lionel Messi in the same period - at the risk of dragging up the most tedious debate in football once again.
In some ways, Son v Haaland represents a modern mirror of Messi v Ronaldo, not only in some vague stylistic parallels but mostly in the sense that the former, in each case, has been much more clinical, whereas the latter has racked up huge numbers largely through brute force and sheer shot volume, getting into high percentage positions over and over again.
According to an article from The Athletic's Thom Harris, written last October, across the prior 6 seasons, Son's overperformance amounted to 23 'extra' goals in total. In the same period, only 3 other players could even boast an excess of +10 - those being Harry Kane (+17.3), Kevin De Bruyne (+13.1) and James Ward-Prowse (+10.3) - no prizes for guessing how the majority of the latter's numbers were racked up.
How does he do it?
This takes us nicely on to the next topic. We now know the extent to which Son dominates his competition when it comes to clinical finishing, but how does he do it? What exactly gives him these exceptional numbers?
The answer lies partly in what Son does but also in the xG models themselves, what they measure and how. One of Son's biggest weapons in the finishing department is his incredible ability to shoot with either foot.
In fact Understat's entire set of data has Son comfortably over performing on shots with his left and with his right. In a 2021 interview with The Independent though, Mike L Goodman, the former managing editor of StatsBomb explained how Son's natural talent with both feet, might actually confound xG models which take into account whether a shot was taken with a player's stronger or weaker foot. In other words, Son literally breaks xG models with his incredible prowess on either foot - from up close or from range.
Goodman goes on to explain how because xG models sometimes struggle to properly interpret the impact of impeding defenders, they can rate one-on-ones as slightly more difficult than they actually are. As someone who appears equally adept at shooting from distance and curling the ball around oncoming defenders as he does bearing down on a goalkeeper, it's hard to know how quite affected Son's data might be by these shortcomings. The point remains though, xG will never be a perfect measure, but it's what we have and it paints enough of a picture to draw some reliable conclusions.
This article began by declaring Son the world's best finisher but it's perhaps a misnomer to include all shots on goals as 'finishes' per se, if we're being pedantic. For xG purposes, though, everything counts. A 'finish' to most football fans evokes the image of a player getting on the end of a through ball or cut back and beating the keeper from close range and to describe one of Son's trademark finesses into the top corner from the edge of the area as a 'finish' might feel wrong, but it is his mastery from range (among other things) that pushes him even further ahead of the competition when it comes to outrunning his xG.
Shots from further away, particularly those where defenders stand between the ball and the goal, carry a much lower xG value than those from closer range.
Son's 22 career league goals from outside the area have come from a cumulative xG of just 9.13, meaning he has scored a staggering 12.87 more than a mere mortal would have from the same attempts.
It is his skill at scoring so many different types of goal with both feet that means he so reliably outperforms those xG figures - essentially, he has no weaknesses. Actually, that is technically not quite true, perhaps unsurprisingly, the one area where Son actually falls behind his xG tally is with his headed attempts, however he clearly knows better than to attempt too many - and the numbers reflect that.
Let's be honest, if Son could head the ball like Harry Kane it simply wouldn't be fair.
A touch above (or below)
If you're not the biggest fan of stats in football, you probably closed this article down pages ago so, if you're still reading, I'll assume you're in for a penny and in for a pound and take us right on to the next dataset explaining why Son is so adept at finding the net.
In a recent Tifo Football Podcast, The Athletic's Jon Mackenzie discussed the emerging importance of another factor in determining chance quality and the effectiveness of shots - that being the number of touches a player takes before shooting. He explained how, as a general rule, there is an inverse correlation between the number of times a player consecutively touches the ball immediately before getting a shot away and the likelihood of that shot going in.
In other words, first-time finishes, or those where a striker takes a single touch and then shoots, are statistically more likely to result in goals. As you might expect, the same is generally true of the amount of time a player spends on the ball before shooting. Some tactical systems, like that of Ange Postecoglou, as Jon explains, are specifically engineered to generate more of these types of chances - he went on to single out Richarlison and his recent collection of goals as a clear example of this paying off.
In his research, Jon painstakingly sat through hours of footage, watching hundreds of shots from Premier League number 9s across the season while recording his findings. It would appear this must have inspired me as I took it upon myself to watch back all of Son Heung-min's many goals for Tottenham. I did this for two reasons; in part because I am a dedicated professional, committed to bringing you the very best in cutting-edge statistical analysis, but mainly because I just really, really love watching Son Heung-min score goals.
What I found was both telling and unsurprising. 44.2% of all Son's goals for Spurs have been first-time finishes and an incredible 67.9% came from either first or second-time finishes, that's more than 2 in every 3. The average number of touches he has taken before a successful attempt on goal works out to just 1.17. When you zero in on just this season under Ange Postecoglou, as Jon's assessment of the Australian's tactics would suggest, this number falls to just 0.58.
His overall figures are dragged up, ever-so-slightly, by a handful of stunning anomalies, ironically some of the goals we probably think of first when we think of Son. There was his brilliant run from the right flank against Chelsea to twist Jorginho and David Luiz inside out (8 touches), the twists and turns from out wide on the goal line before squeezing in from an angle against Man City (7 touches) and, of course, the award-winning pitch-length drive through the entire Burnley team (12 glorious touches).
Despite those exceptions, it's clear that Son sees the importance of getting his shots off early, before defenders and goalkeepers have a chance to know what's hit them, and this is yet another reason why he is so devastating in front of goal.
As I alluded to early on this is piece, there is an irony to the fact that arguably the most clinical finisher of his generation hasn't, until now, ever even been the main man or talisman at his own club. Crawling out from under the sizable shadow of Harry Kane is no simple task, yet it's an intriguing thought experiment to wonder how he may have fared all these years without him.
I'd forgive anyone rushing to remind me at this stage that a huge chunk of Son's goals were in fact laid on a plate for him by the visionary genius of Harry Kane, as that is of course an important variable to keep in mind. I'm also not one from the school of thought that believes this iteration of Spurs would be worse with Kane in the side.
However, were Son to have spent the last decade either playing through the middle in a Spurs side capable of that same level of creativity from other parts of the pitch, or better yet (forgive me Spurs fans) at a truly elite and domestically-dominant club - Man City, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich for example - just how many goals might he have ended up scoring?
Perhaps it's not quite that simple, football is riddled with chaos after all and it's worth noting that Cristiano Ronaldo had his most prolific years as a nominal left-winger; the same could be said of Kylian Mbappé. Maybe where Son excels in lethal finishing, he falls behind just slightly on his ability to find goalscoring positions to quite the degree of Haaland, Messi, Kane, Ronaldo, Lewandowski and the like.
Nobody can ever truly know of course, but what should be beyond doubt is that Son Heung-min is virtually beyond comparison among his contemporaries when it comes to executing that one thing that brings so many of us so much joy every weekend - kicking a football into a goal. From almost anywhere on the pitch and just as comfortably from either side of it, the Spurs man has been making a mockery of xG models for years.
He's not a Gerd Müller or a Gary Lineker drifting in to the 6-yard box to tap the ball in, nor is he a Rúben Neves hitting screamers in from audacious range; he is all of these and everything in between.
Rarely in football do you ever see a player in such a league of his own when it comes to all varieties of a particular fundamental skill (unless his name happens to be Lionel Messi and that skill is, well, anything).
Whether the ball is bobbling around precariously in the box, slid in expertly behind a scurrying defensive line or teed up just nicely on the edge of the area begging to be hit, whip our your calculator in that moment and crunch those numbers and you will find there's simply no man in the game today you'd rather have putting his boot through it.