There have been plenty of murmurs about Son Heung-Min signing a new contract at Tottenham Hotspur over the past year, but nothing has come of it. Now there’s a new report from Ben Jacobs that says Spurs will exercise an option in Sonny’s contract to keep him at the club for a further year.
So this actually makes a lot of sense and is illuminating as to what will likely be Tottenham’s plans for Sonny in the medium term. Sonny’s current contract lasted until the end of this current season, though everyone at and around the club seemed pretty relaxed about what that meant. This seems to split the difference between letting Sonny go at the end of the season and tying him down to a long-term contract, which is probably not a very wise decision either. Daniel Levy loves to put these extra one year clauses in his players’ contracts, probably for this very reason.
Son turns 33 this season and will be 34 by the time his now-extended Spurs contract expires. That’s pretty long in the tooth for a professional footballer, even one as beloved as Sonny, and Tottenham are clearly on a youth movement. He’s Spurs’ club captain and the face of the club since Harry Kane was sold last summer, but at some point he’s going to reach the point where Spurs will need to figure out what to do with him — now they have an extra year to figure that out.
Maybe Sonny eventually moves on, either as a sale next summer or as a free agent in June 2026. Maybe he ends up retiring, or moving to MLS, or back to the K-League. This keeps him at Spurs in an elder statesman role as he and the club figure out his future. I vote for a graceful retirement and an immediate and permanent club ambassador role. Oh, and a statue outside the ground. That’d be neat.