For about eighty-nine minutes on September 20, Son Heung-min authored the kind of performance that reminds an entire league why a 33-year-old former Tottenham Hotspur captain, arriving in Major League Soccer with more silverware and more global recognition than perhaps any player the league has ever signed, still moves at a different speed than almost everyone else on the field. He scored. He set up a second goal. And in doing so, he pulled level with Lionel Messi — the player most responsible for MLS’s recent explosion in relevance — atop the league’s assists table. Then, in the final thirty seconds of second-half stoppage time, all of it very nearly stopped mattering, as Los Angeles FC conceded a wonder strike from distance that turned a signature road win into a deflating 2-2 draw.
It was the kind of night that captures everything about Son’s move to LAFC in miniature: brilliant individual quality, a team still working out its identity around him, and a result that ends up feeling like both more and less than the sum of its parts.
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A Fast Start in Santa Clara
The match was a Major League Soccer regular-season fixture, LAFC traveling north to face the San Jose Earthquakes at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California — a building better known for hosting the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers than a soccer match, but one that has become a semi-regular venue for Bay Area soccer fixtures. LAFC set up in a 4-3-3, with Son deployed as the central striker, the focal point of the attack rather than the wide-left role he sometimes occupies.
He needed only thirty-four minutes to make his presence felt. Picking up a pass that had traveled through Aaron Long and Mark Delgado, Son drove directly at the San Jose defense, closed the distance to goal himself, and rifled a low, precise left-footed strike inside the far post. It was his sixth goal of the MLS season, and it arrived after an eight-match drought without one — the kind of finish that looked less like a player breaking a slump and more like a player who had simply been waiting for the right moment to remind everyone what he does for a living.
For readers unfamiliar with the rhythms of a long MLS season, a goal drought of eight matches for a player of Son’s caliber is unremarkable in the way that a cold shooting stretch is unremarkable for an elite basketball scorer — noticeable, occasionally the subject of concerned questions from reporters, but rarely a real signal that something is fundamentally wrong. What happened next made that point for him.
A Red Card Changes the Math
Two minutes after Son’s opener, the match tilted. LAFC defender Aaron Long committed a foul that the referee judged to have denied San Jose a clear goal-scoring opportunity — a professional foul, in the sport’s vernacular — and was shown a straight red card in the 36th minute. LAFC, still in the first half of a match they’d just taken the lead in, would have to play more than an hour of soccer with ten men.
For American readers more familiar with other sports, the closest analogy is a hockey major penalty that runs the length of an entire period and then some, except here the shorthanded situation doesn’t end after five minutes — it runs for the rest of the match, over sixty minutes of match time, with no substitute allowed to replace the sent-off player. Soccer teams reduced to ten men typically retreat into a defensive shell, conceding possession and hoping to survive on set pieces and counterattacks. LAFC, and Son Heung-min specifically, had other ideas.
The Assist That Doubled the Lead
Eight minutes into the second half, with LAFC still up a goal and down a man, Son turned provider. Collecting the ball in a counterattacking situation, he drove forward into space that a disorganized San Jose defense — still adjusting to the extra runner LAFC could commit going forward, given the numbers — failed to close down in time. Son slipped a pass through the gap, and Denis Bouanga, LAFC’s regular focal scoring threat before Son’s arrival and now a beneficiary of playing alongside him, finished it to make the score 2-0.
The assist did more than double LAFC’s lead. It pushed Son’s season tally to thirteen assists, which, combined with his six goals, made him one of the most productive attacking players in the league by any measure. More specifically, it moved him level with Lionel Messi atop the 2026 MLS assists chart — a fact that multiple South Korean outlets flagged as close to unbelievable, given that Messi’s arrival at Inter Miami in 2023 fundamentally reset expectations for what individual dominance in this league could look like. Being the co-leader in a category Messi also leads is, in a very literal sense, as good a case as exists for saying a player has adapted seamlessly to a new league.
For American readers, the comparison lands immediately: Messi is not just a great player in MLS, he is the reason casual American sports fans started paying attention to MLS at all. A player who ties him in a meaningful statistical category, seven months into his MLS career, is not a curiosity. He is a legitimate MVP-conversation name.
San Jose Claws Back, Then Steals a Point
LAFC’s two-goal, ten-man lead held for a while, but soccer has a habit of punishing teams who cannot convert territorial and numerical disadvantages into results for their opponents. In the 70th minute, San Jose finally broke through: Preston Judd rose to meet a cross from Timo Werner — yes, the same Timo Werner familiar to fans of Chelsea and RB Leipzig in Europe, now plying his trade in MLS — and headed the ball home to cut the deficit to 2-1.
LAFC nearly restored the two-goal cushion in the match’s closing stages. A deflected shot off a defender, following a pass into the box, appeared to have given Son and LAFC breathing room again. Video review intervened, however, and the goal was disallowed for a foul earlier in the buildup — a swing of fortune that, in hindsight, made the final act of the match feel almost inevitable in its cruelty.
With the clock deep into second-half stoppage time — inside the final thirty seconds of a match LAFC had spent over an hour trying to close out with a numerical disadvantage — San Jose defender Reed Roberts stepped into a shot from well outside the penalty area, a speculative strike from distance that had no business finding the corner of the net. It did anyway. The ball beat the LAFC goalkeeper and crossed the line, and just like that, a match LAFC had controlled for the better part of ninety minutes with ten men finished level, 2-2.
What the Draw Actually Cost LAFC
It is worth sitting with how unusual this result actually is. Teams that go down to ten men in the 36th minute and still lead 2-0 with twenty minutes to play are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, going to walk away with all three points. LAFC’s failure to do so will sting more than a standard midweek draw would, precisely because of how much individual brilliance from Son Heung-min it took just to get to that position in the first place.
The draw leaves LAFC’s position in the Western Conference table unresolved in the way these things often are mid-season — neither a disaster nor a triumph, but a missed opportunity to bank three points against a direct rival for playoff positioning. For a club that made one of the more eye-catching signings of the MLS offseason in bringing over a player of Son’s stature, results like this one are a reminder that individual excellence, even at the highest level, does not automatically translate into team results when the other ten outfield players are working with a numbers disadvantage for the majority of the match.
Son Heung-min’s MLS Adjustment, in Full View
Whatever frustration LAFC’s locker room felt about the final scoreline, the broader story of Son Heung-min’s season continues to be one of remarkably smooth adaptation to a new continent, a new league, and a different style of play than the one that defined his decade-plus at Tottenham Hotspur. Six goals and thirteen assists, with the assist tally now shared with the most decorated attacking player of this MLS era, is not a modest return by any standard — it is a genuinely elite offensive season, delivered in Son’s first extended run in North American soccer.
There is a version of this transition that goes differently. Plenty of accomplished European players have struggled to find rhythm in MLS, whether because of the travel demands of a geographically sprawling league, the different tactical rhythms of the American game, or simply the adjustment of leaving behind the week-to-week intensity of the Premier League. Son’s numbers through this stretch of the season suggest none of that has been a serious obstacle. If anything, matches like the one in Santa Clara — where he was directly involved in both of his team’s goals despite his side playing over an hour with a numerical disadvantage — suggest a player who has found a level of individual influence over matches that may exceed what even optimistic LAFC supporters expected when the transfer was announced.
Explaining the Red Card, for Readers New to the Sport
It is worth pausing on why Aaron Long’s dismissal mattered so much to the shape of the rest of the match, since American readers coming to soccer from other sports sometimes underestimate just how significant a single red card can be. Unlike a personal foul in football or a technical foul in basketball, a red card in soccer removes a player from the match entirely, with no substitute permitted to replace him. The offending team is stuck playing with ten field players — effectively one fewer body to cover every blade of grass — for whatever time remains, which in this case was the rest of the first half plus the entirety of the second half, more than sixty minutes of match time.
Coaches generally respond to a red card by sacrificing an attacker for a defender, shoring up the back line and inviting the opposition to have the ball, on the theory that conceding possession is an acceptable price for preserving numbers where it matters most. That LAFC instead doubled its lead after going down a man, largely through the individual quality of Son Heung-min, is what made the eventual concession of a stoppage-time equalizer sting as much as it did inside the LAFC locker room. Teams do not often get whipsawed from “cruising with a two-goal, man-advantage cushion” to “settling for a draw” in the space of twenty second-half minutes, and when it happens, the tactical post-mortems tend to focus less on the individual moments and more on game management down the stretch — how a team with fewer bodies on the field chooses to spend its energy protecting a lead rather than chasing a third goal.
A Result to Shake Off, Not Dwell On
For Son personally, the goal-and-assist outing is a continuation of the form line that matters most: he is producing at an elite rate in a new league, in a new country, at an age when many wondered whether his best days were behind him. The frustration of the stoppage-time equalizer belongs to the team as a whole rather than to any individual performance, and certainly not to a player who did as much as any single man reasonably could to secure the result on his own.
LAFC will have to regroup, sort out the kind of late-game defensive management that allows a two-goal, man-advantage cushion to evaporate in the final half-minute of a match, and turn its attention to the next fixture on the calendar. For Son Heung-min, the challenge going forward is simpler in outline if not in execution: keep producing at the rate he has shown across this stretch of matches, and results like this — bitterly disappointing in the moment, but built on top of another dominant individual display — will increasingly be remembered as the exception rather than the rule.
Whatever else changes about LAFC’s season from here, one thing is now a matter of record: in his first year in Major League Soccer, Son Heung-min has been productive enough, often enough, to stand statistically shoulder to shoulder with Lionel Messi in a category that measures exactly the kind of vision and selflessness that has defined his career from Hamburg to Bayer Leverkusen to Tottenham and now to Los Angeles. That is not a small thing, regardless of how any single scoreline turns out.
As an Amazon Associate, Tiarat earns from qualifying purchases.
As an Amazon Associate, Tiarat earns from qualifying purchases.