Tottenham Hotspur star Son Heung-min’s father and brother have been fined in a child abuse case, South Korean prosecutors told AFP on Friday.
Son Woong-jung is a public figure in South Korea and authored a best-selling memoir detailing how he helped his son become one of the best strikers in the English Premier League.
He runs a football academy where his elder son Son Heung-yun coached.
The pair and another coach at the academy were accused in April of physically and verbally abusing a 12-year-old student.
Prosecutors said on Friday that they have fined Son Woong-jung, Son Heung-yun and a coach based on the Child Welfare Act and Child Abuse Punishment Act, without specifying how much the fine was.
All three were also ordered to undertake child abuse treatment programmes.
The student’s family claimed a coach hit him with a corner flag during training, causing injuries that required weeks of treatment.
The student, identified only as Kim, told police he was the target of foul language just weeks after his enrollment at Son senior’s academy in November.
“I was called out by coach Son for making a mistake during a passing practice,” Kim alleged in the interview.
Son senior, 62, acknowledged the incident had occurred, but denied it amounted to physical abuse.
“This incident was not corporal punishment but a mutually agreed event as part of fitness training,” he said in a statement.
Son Heung-yun previously said that he and Son Heung-min were “hit by our father a lot when training, which is unimaginable these days”.
“Some of our neighbours even doubted he was our real father,” he told AFP in a 2019 interview.
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Parents of players training at the football academy run by the father of Korean football star Son Heung-min on Thursday dismissed child abuse allegations against him.
Son Woong-jung, a former player and director of Son Football Academy, and two of his coaches are under investigation over charges that they had physically and verbally abused a young player.
In a joint statement issued Thursday, parents of other players said they had never once heard of or seen any corporal punishment at the football facility over the many years that their children had spent there.
The young player who raised abuse allegations has claimed that he was struck with a corner flag by one of the coaches during a training camp in Okinawa, Japan, in March.
However, the other parents on Thursday said they didn’t notice anything peculiar while in Okinawa.
“Even our children are wondering what happened that day,” the parents’ statement read. “We are not putting coach Son on a pedestal or justifying physical punishment. But people from the outside are blowing things out of proportion, when those who have been at the facility didn’t see anything wrong. And those outsiders have turned all other members of the academy into victims and that has been troubling for us. We’d like to ask them to stop this.”
These parents said their children have been facing intense media scrutiny since allegations against Son were first reported last week.
“We have drones from news outlets flying above training pitches, and numerous articles have been written on the academy,” the parents’ statement read. “Our daily lives have been thrown out of whack by all the calls we’ve been taking from the media.”
The parents also took shots at civic groups and the state-run Korea Sports Ethics Center for making assumptions about Son and his staff.
“People at civic groups that have never once set foot on the field are calling the coach violent, even though they’ve never met him. And the ethics center is threatening to investigate the academy even though it has never paid attention to this place before,” the parents said. “Children training here say they are happy. So who are these people really investigating this matter for? Whose human rights are they trying to protect?”
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