He will be out for “a number of weeks”, the club said, guaranteeing he will miss the first leg of the Uefa Champions League round-of-16 game against RB Leipzig and Saturday’s game against Chelsea, a key game in the battle for fourth place and qualification for next season’s Champions League.

His manager Jose Mourinho thinks he will be out for the season. “I'm not going to count on him again this season,” Mourinho said on Tuesday, contradicting the club’s earlier statement.

“If he plays two or three games then it's because he [Tottenham's press officer] is very optimistic, and I hope he is right. But, in my mind, I'm not thinking about that.

However long Son’s absence, it could end up only adding to his reputation. The absence of the man that has stepped up to replace the injured Harry Kane, both this season and last, makes the hearts of supporters grow fonder.

It is widely accepted that Son is the best Asian footballer in the game right now. He has won the last three AFC Asian International Player of the Year awards and four in the seven years it has been around. He has also won Best Footballer in Asia three years in a row, which is open to players who play for AFC nations or for clubs in AFC leagues.

Son has set records on the pitch. He became the first Asian to pass the 50-goal mark in the English Premier League mark (excluding Australians such as Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell and Tim Cahill, who all made their debuts when Australia was still part of Oceania, not the AFC).

If China’s Sun Jihai was entered into the English Football Hall of Fame for 123 Premier League appearances, three goals and seven assists then Son has to follow him.

Son is also the top-scoring Asian in the Uefa Champions League, his four goals beating off Uzbekistani Maksim Shatskikh’s record of 23 with Dynamo Kiev across the UCL and Uefa Cup/Europa League. He will surely also make up the 20 games to pass Shatskikh’s appearance record of 69.

He’s clearly the greatest of his generation – is he the greatest Asian footballer of all time?

The International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS) ranked their Asian Player of the Century back in 1999 and put South Korea’s pioneering Cha Bum-kun top of the list.

After being released by the military, Cha moved to Eintracht Frankfurt in Germany and hit the ground scoring, winning the Uefa Cup in his first season and having Aberdeen manager Alex Ferguson describe him as “unstoppable” after his side lost their meeting.

Cha was ranked alongside back-to-back Ballon d’Or winner Kevin Keegan and the European Footballer of the Year Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in Kicker’s team of the season and won the German Cup the next season before another Uefa Cup with Bayer Leverkusen in 1988. He is still seventh in the top-scoring foreigners list in the Bundesliga and remains South Korea’s record scorer.

Second to Cha on the IFFHS list was another South Korean, Kim Joo-sung, and third was Saudi Arabia’s Majed Abdullah, two more stars who will have been in recent memory when the IFFHS vote was taken.

We skew towards the players that we can see either in the flesh or on recent video, beset by the belief that the current game is its best version.

That’s bad news for players like Lee Wai-tong, the Hongkonger known as the “Asian football king” during his time with South China and representing China at the 1936 Olympics, who is said to have outscored even Pele. It’s the same for Barcelona legend Paulino Alcantara, who was born in the Philippines and starred for the club in two spells in the 1910s and 20s. He was the club's top goalscorer with 395 goals in 399 games before being overtaken by Leo Messi.

Modern memories might say Hidetoshi Nakata, who won the Serie A title with Roma in 2001 and was the most expensive Asian player in history until Son moved to Spurs in 2015. Or they might argue for Iran’s Ali Daei, who holds the men’s international goals record. Manchester United stalwart Park Ji-sung, the first Asian player to play a Uefa Champions League final or Kazuyoshi “King Kazu” Miura, who is about to start a new J.League season aged 52 are as deserving.

It’s subjective, of course: Celtic fans would not have a word against Japanese free-kick king Shunsuke Nakamura

That’s fine, football is a game of opinions but modern fans shout loudest now the game is truly global.

That means the advantage of being regarded as Asia’s best ever is with Son but he needs to win trophies to cement his place. That might not be at Spurs. Son has been linked with Real Madrid in recent seasons, while his agent played up links with Napoli. “One day who knows?” Thies Bliemeister told Radio Marte last year.

There are youngsters coming up who might yet outshine Son. Takumi Minamino, who has just moved to Liverpool, offers promise as does former teammate Hwang Hee-chan at RB Salzburg. Then in Spain there’s Lee Kang-in at Valencia, Takefusa Kubo at Real Madrid and Hiroke Abe at Barcelona.

Maybe one of those will be the first Asian player to win a Ballon d’Or, maybe it will be others still, but for now Son is shining brightest, even if injury is keeping him out of the limelight.