Son Heung-min's Move to LAFC: From Reluctance to Embracing MLS

Son Heung-min didn’t dream of Los Angeles.

When the first message came through that Los Angeles FC were circling, the Tottenham forward brushed it aside. MLS, in his mind, was where careers wound down, not where an established Premier League star in his early 30s went to test himself.

“I thought, ‘Why would I go to MLS already? I’m definitely not going,’” he recalled on the podcast “The Late Run,” whose latest episode dropped on Friday.

For a player who had come through Hamburger SV in the Bundesliga and then spent a decade in the unforgiving glare of the Premier League with Tottenham Hotspur, that attitude made sense. Europe’s top five leagues had shaped him. MLS sat on the periphery of his ambitions.

Then the final year of his Spurs contract arrived. And the question that stalks every elite player — what next? — started to bite.

From reluctance to resolve

Son left Tottenham last summer after 10 years in North London and stunned many by choosing LAFC. In South Korea and across Europe, the reaction was the same: why now? He still looked more than capable of operating at the very top level in Europe.

The answer, Son explained, is that the move he once dismissed slowly became the one challenge he could no longer ignore.

His agent first passed on LAFC’s interest while Son was still in London. He barely entertained it. But LAFC didn’t drift away. They pushed. They waited. They made it clear this wasn’t a marketing play, it was a long-term pursuit.

“When I had one year left on my contract, I felt that I needed a new challenge,” Son said. That feeling opened the door. His agent urged him to at least listen, to take a meeting.

They spoke over Zoom. That call changed everything.

Son realized LAFC had tracked him for a long time, not just as a name but as a player they believed could lead a project. He said he could feel how genuine the club’s interest was. The skepticism he’d held about MLS began to crack. Conviction replaced doubt. That, he said, “made me decide to move.”

A new league, a new respect

The move to LAFC did more than alter the course of his own career. It forced Son to re-evaluate a league he had once underestimated.

“I didn’t know much about MLS before coming here,” he admitted. What he found surprised him.

Packed stadiums. Noise. Colour. A league that, in his words, has carried the energy of the World Cup and is now fighting to sustain it.

“I was surprised and happy to see the stadiums packed for every game,” he said. The sight shifted his perception of MLS from retirement stop to serious stage.

For Son, the responsibility now is clear. “After the World Cup, it is now the responsibility of the players and the league to keep that momentum going.”

From dismissing the idea of MLS outright in London to embracing the glare of Los Angeles, Son’s journey is no gentle fade into the background. It is a bet that his next defining chapter might be written far from the places where he first made his name.