Son Heung-min's Surprising Move to LAFC
Son Heung-min did not picture his career in Los Angeles. Not at first.
When his agent first mentioned that Los Angeles FC were circling, the Tottenham Hotspur captain brushed it aside. MLS, in his mind, was where stars went to coast into retirement, not where a forward still sharp enough for the Premier League or Bundesliga would spend his prime years.
“I thought, ‘Why would I go to MLS already? I’m definitely not going,’” Son recalled on the podcast “The Late Run,” whose latest episode dropped on Friday.
This was a player forged in Europe’s elite. He broke through at Hamburger SV in the Bundesliga, then became one of the Premier League’s most feared forwards at Tottenham. For someone who had lived in what many regard as the world’s toughest domestic league, MLS sat several rungs lower in his imagination.
That image didn’t survive the final year of his Spurs contract.
From dismissal to decision
The turning point came when the calendar and his contract started to align. With one year left on his deal at Tottenham, the questions grew louder in his own head. Did he want to sign on again in north London? Did he want a new test, a different rhythm, a different pressure?
“When I had one year left on my contract, I felt that I needed a new challenge,” Son said.
LAFC sensed that moment and refused to fade into the background. They pushed. They waited. They kept calling.
His agent urged him to at least listen. One Zoom meeting later, the conversation stopped being theoretical.
“My agent suggested that I have a meeting with LAFC, so we spoke over Zoom,” Son said. “I realized that LAFC had been following me for a long time, and I could feel how genuine their interest was. That made me decide to move.”
The sincerity struck him. This was not a casual enquiry for a marquee name to sell shirts. This was a club that had tracked him for years and built a plan around him. The new challenge he felt he needed suddenly had a clear shape and a clear badge.
Leaving Spurs, surprising the world
Son walked away from Tottenham last summer after a decade in north London. Ten years of goals, derbies, and near-misses in the hunt for silverware ended with a move that stunned fans in South Korea and across Europe.
He was still widely viewed as good enough for any of Europe’s top five leagues. A player of his calibre choosing MLS, not another Champions League-chasing side, jolted the usual career narrative.
Yet for Son, the decision had already hardened. The pull of LAFC’s project and the hunger for something new outweighed the comfort of staying in familiar territory. Once he felt the club’s conviction, the league he once dismissed became the stage for his next act.
A league reimagined
What he found in the United States did not match his old assumptions.
“I didn’t know much about MLS before coming here, but I was surprised and happy to see the stadiums packed for every game,” he said.
The crowds, the noise, the sense that this was a league on the rise rather than a soft landing, all forced a rethink. For a player who had spent his life in Europe’s pressure cookers, the energy in MLS came as a welcome shock.
And the timing matters. With the World Cup on the horizon in North America and interest in the sport spiking, Son sees a responsibility that stretches beyond his own performances.
“After the World Cup, it is now the responsibility of the players and the league to keep that momentum going,” he said.
From skepticism in London to packed stands in Los Angeles, Son’s journey into MLS has already rewritten one of football’s familiar stories: that the move across the Atlantic is an ending. For him, LAFC is the start of a new chapter—and he knows the league will be judged on what players like him do with it.
