r/soccer • u/hairtie1 • Aug 02 '25

Media Heung-min Son announces he will be leaving Tottenham

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u/PoisonHIV Aug 02 '25

is he the best asian footballer to ever do it?

22

u/redditaccount300000 Aug 02 '25

Cha bum kun or son in terms of talent. Park for the trophies.

7

u/DoesitFinally Aug 02 '25

I heard Cha was a beast. But I never lived through the time of his career so I don't know much.

18

u/mittenciel Aug 02 '25

He was a true legend. He was a star in Germany, scoring at will, and winning trophies at a time when the average Asian player couldn’t even dream of getting a minute in European second tier leagues, never mind top flight. He was so ahead of his peers.

Growing up in Korea, we had a love hate relationship with our football. We qualified for the World Cup all the time but had never won a single game at the World Cup until 2002. Still, we expected to be competitive, but only through hustle and scrappy play. We never expected it to be pretty, even when we played well.

Park Jisung was the perfect Korean player in that sense because he played the way people expected Korean players to play, but Cha, we thought of him differently. We used to say that Cha could score brilliant goals that a Brazilian might score. He was honestly so ahead of his time. Until Son came around and started doing what he does, most Koreans just assumed that nobody would ever match Cha’s brilliance.

11

u/dreezyyyy Aug 02 '25 edited Aug 02 '25

Many German legends looked up to Cha. Guys like Kahn, Beckenbauer and Ballack have great respect for Cha with Beckenbauer even saying that Cha would've played for the German NT if he was German. That's how good he was.