Son Heung-Min named Tottenham club captain after Harry Kane’s departure

With Harry Kane departing for Bayern Munich and Hugo Lloris looking for a new club to move to, Tottenham Hotspur have a leadership vacuum.

Or rather, had a leadership vacuum. According to David Ornstein, Spurs manager Ange Postecoglou has named his club captains. His choice for overall club captain is perhaps the obvious one, but still the correct one — of course, it’s Son Heung-Min. James Maddison and Cuti Romero were named vice-captains.

If you’d polled 100 Spurs fans about who should be club captain after Harry Kane, I’d bet about 90 of them would say Sonny. He’s the obvious choice. He’s South Korea’s captain and has always had a leadership role on the team, even if he didn’t often wear the armband. He’s the perfect choice for a team that has lost its talisman and needs someone behind the scenes to create stability among the playing squad.

Maybe slightly more controversial are the vice-captain picks. Cuti Romero certainly has leadership qualities, and some had tapped him as a dark horse for club captain, but maybe for some that reckless streak might have put some off. Maddison, by contrast, is absolutely captain material but has only been with the club a matter of weeks. One might have thought Eric Dier would be in line for a captaincy, but there have also been reports that he’s unfollowed Tottenham on Instagram in the past couple of days... maybe this is why?

One of my hot football taeks is that fans of English football tend to seriously overrate the importance of captains on their teams. Not that player leadership isn’t important — it clearly is. I just don’t really care that much who wears an armband in a match. Let the leaders of a team lead; “captaincy” as a public-facing institution just seems outdated and not that important to my eyes and a lot of fans tend to obsess over it for reasons I can’t fathom. Rotate the armband throughout the squad for all I care. (English football fans tend to get really mad when I say this.)

But all that said, if you’re going to pick a captain to be the public face of club leadership, you sure can’t pick a better one than our Large Adult Son. He’s perfect.

Good job, Ange. Now let’s go crush Brentford.