Son juggling for four hours: Tottenham’s Heung-min Son talks about his Dad’s soccer training sessions. “My dad made me juggle a ball for FOUR hours at a time!” Son’s Dad had a number of interesting training methods. Son didn’t even play on a competitive team until he was around 15 years old. And he didn’t working on shooting until then either. The focus in soccer training was on technique and mastering the ability to do things with the soccer ball equally well with both feet.
This style of soccer training makes sense though. If you ever seen young kids playing soccer in games it just seems silly. They’re all bunched together. Nobody is really getting touches on the soccer ball. It doesn’t make sense for kids at this age to even play in real games until they’ve improve their skills with the soccer ball.
Even the interviewer is like, “FOUR HOURS?”
Image credit goes to BT Sport.
Here’s the full story on Son’s juggling for four hours from The Athletic:
Son’s father Son Woong-jung is a former footballer himself but retired because of injury at 28. He then made it his mission to train up his sons Heung-min and Heung-yun, who played in the German fifth tier but is now a coach at his brother’s academy (more on that later).
Woong-jung did not let his sons join a competitive team until they were teenagers, instead forcing them to partake in repetitive drills that would improve their technique. This is now the philosophy that underpins Son’s academy, based in his hometown of Chuncheon, a couple of hours east of Seoul.
One exercise, according to Heung-yun, involved the brothers having to keep the ball up in the air for four hours at a time, restarting the clock if the ball fell to the floor. The story sounds apocryphal, but Erik Thorstvedt, the former Spurs goalkeeper who visited Son’s academy last year for Norwegian channel TV3, says given the way the youngsters are trained at the academy it wouldn’t surprise him if it were true.
So maybe you’d don’t have to juggle the soccer ball for four hours by why not practice it for at least one!