Report: Wolfsburg wants to bring Tottenham’s Son back to Bundesliga

There are more rumors emerging that link Tottenham forward Son Heung-Min with a summer departure from Tottenham Hotspur. This one is from Sky Germany, courtesy of the Evening Standard, and says that Wolfsburg are interested in bringing the South Korean international back to the Bundesliga, where he spent a number of good seasons with Bayer Leverkusen and Hamburg.

So I’m really not worried about this rumor at all at the moment. There’s the usual complete lack of corroborating evidence, of course. Also, while I can’t find the original source on Sky Germany’s website, the price of €20m/£17m that’s listed in the Standard is kind of laughable, considering Spurs spent £22m for him a year ago and Daniel Levy is adept at squeezing blood out of a stone. Moreover, the gist of the story appears to be that Wolfsburg is interested in Son, not that Son is necessarily available.

But it’s more than that. The entire premise doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, and never has.

Sonny was a bit of a mixed bag last season: he made 40 appearances and scored 8 goals for Spurs in all competitions, but most of them were off the bench in a reserve role and there was the sense that he wasn’t always on the same page as his Tottenham teammates.. That’s still not bad considering he was adjusting to English football and missed a chunk of matches due to injury.

The Matt Law piece from May that possibly started all the rumors about Sonny being linked away made all of us perk their ears up a little and start to worry that Son didn’t feature in Mauricio Pochettino’s plans. I confess, that story put a sliver of doubt about Sonny’s place in the team in me, one that remains now.

But there’s no doubt that Son is still a very talented player. Even with the (expected? possible? mythical?) arrival of Georges-Kevin N’Koudou, Sonny should still be considered at worst a solid rotation option for Spurs. We might not see him for a while since he missed most of the preseason while with Korea at the Olympics, but I find it a little hard to countenance selling Sonny at a loss when the team still has players like Nacer Chadli and Ryan Mason in the squad (especially when Spurs were asking £20m from Swansea for Chadli not too long ago).

Even so, it’s still not out of the realm of possibility. There have been murmurs for a while now that Spurs would listen to offers for Son. If they get what they think is a good price for him, I can see a potential scenario where he could yet depart this summer. But with just over a week to go before the window closes, I doubt it, and I think it would take a bigger offer than what Wolfsburg are apparently making to pull it off.