This article is part of Football FanCast’s Opinion series, which provides analysis, insight and opinion on any issue within the beautiful game, from Paul Pogba’s haircuts to League Two relegation battles…
Heung-Min Son could be Jose Mourinho’s next Eden Hazard.
Tottenham Hotspur made a major change earlier this week, sacking Mauricio Pochettino on Tuesday evening and replacing him with the former Manchester United and Real Madrid boss less than 12 hours later.
Mourinho, of course, has a winner’s pedigree. He has won a major trophy at every club he has managed since his time with Porto, where he won the Champions League.
Yet he had something of a blind spot during his second tenure at Chelsea: Hazard.
The Belgium international, so sparkling in his last season at Chelsea, never quite produced his absolute best under Mourinho.
Indeed, he reached his zenith with the Blues in 2016/17 and again in 2018/19. He scored 16 league goals in both of those seasons and finished the latter with 15 assists.
Under Mourinho, his numbers were never quite so high.
In both 2013/14 and 2014/15, he scored 14 goals in the league, a respectable tally that was combined with a total of 19 assists.
While in 15/16, the stats fell off a cliff.
Admittedly, this was the Portuguese’s final season at Stamford Bridge but in 16 Premier League games, Hazard didn’t score a single goal.
He did provide three assists but this was a player who was struggling to play for his manager, as he played primarily as a left winger. In those first 16 games, Chelsea won just four times.
And while Antonio Conte and Maurizio Sarri very much set up their teams to get the absolute best out of Hazard – the former essentially giving him a free role in a 3-4-3 setup – Mourinho made his feelings on the attacker’s duties clear after a loss to Atletico Madrid in 2014.
After Hazard failed to track back for one of the goals, the Portuguese said: “He’s not the kind of player to sacrifice himself for the team.
“Eden is the kind of player that is not so mentally ready to look back to his left-back and to leave his life for him. If you see the first goal of Atlético you completely understand where the mistake was and why we conceded that goal. The perfect team at the top level cannot make these kinds of mistakes.”
That gives a pretty clear indication of the shackles Mourinho placed on his biggest attacking threat.
The parallel with Son in terms of playing style, rated at £72m by Transfermarkt, is clear. Both players love to dribble and cut inside from the flank and score.
The South Korea international has become a global star during his time at Spurs and is clearly an exceptional presence on the left flank.
After a slow start in 15/16, in which he scored four league goals, he hit 14 in 16/17 and 12 in the two following. Thus far this season, he already has three league goals in 10 appearances.
But the question, here, is how Mourinho will utilise him. Will he be allowed to drift between central and wide positions, to sneak a yard on his full-back and find space on the counter-attack, or will he be expected to track back like Hazard was?
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If he wants the same from Son, he risks blunting his attacking edge, as Mourinho eventually did with Hazard.
It is a tight rope that he will have to walk, as the 27-year-old is Spurs’ second-best attacker after Harry Kane.
Turning him into the defensive winger he tried to mould Hazard into can only go badly.
