A Premier League matchday might seem a long way from a cold training pitch in Austria, but for Hwang Hee-chan the work done on one is paying off on the other.
It was at Red Bull Salzburg’s training ground that, as a raw youngster from South Korea, he fine-tuned the finishing skills that have made him Wolverhampton Wanderers’ leading goalscorer this season.
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“We met in the afternoon after training to do some individual work with him because he had very good speed but he needed to improve some skills like his finishing,” recalls Oscar Garcia, the former Brighton and Watford boss who managed Hwang at Red Bull Salzburg, where a young Erling Haaland was one of his team-mates.
Hwang arrived at Wolves on loan in the summer of 2021 — a deal that became permanent in July 2022. That summer Hwang was a transfer target for Leeds United, then managed by Jesse Marsch, another of his former bosses at Salzburg. With Wolves keen to reshape their forward line, a fair offer might have seen Hwang leave Molineux, but Marsch could not muster enough support at his club and the deal never got close.
Much has changed for Hwang since then. Fifteen months on, the 27-year-old is a key man in Gary O’Neil’s new-look Wolves team with a new contract in the offing that would reflect his growing status at Molineux. When Wolves face Fulham at Craven Cottage tonight, Hwang will be considered the most likely scorer.
For a side who have been unable to average more than a goal per game in each of the last three Premier League seasons, Hwang’s six in the first 12 games of this campaign have been precious.
His finishing has been the biggest improvement, with his six goals coming from an expected goals (xG) tally — the number of goals he would be expected to achieve from the chances he has had — of just 2.6, a mark of how clinical he has been.
On the one hand, those numbers underline that his goalscoring is statistically unlikely to continue at its current rate. But Wolves fans knew that already.
More positively, a look at his shot maps from the last two seasons suggests that, while he might not maintain the current rate of a goal every 129 minutes of league action, Wolves are providing him with better service, so he should continue to be a threat.
He has already had as many shots (18) in his 774 minutes this season as he managed in 1,130 minutes in the whole of last season.
And while his xG per shot figure is relatively unchanged, his chances are coming significantly closer to the opponent’s goal — 10.8 yards, down from 15 yards last season.
His hard work in Austria is coming to fruition.
“We trained a lot in the afternoon with my staff, me and a goalkeeper to improve this because he had many chances to score but his percentage of success was not so high,” recalls Garcia.
“We worked a lot with him like this and he never complained, he was always prepared to learn and to improve and now you can see the results. He has the speed, he’s clever to be in the right place at the right moment, so he lacked a little bit of finishing but he has kept on improving.
“At Salzburg, we played with two strikers and he was one of the two. He can also play on the wing because he is fast and clever with his movement and he is not a target striker.”
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Garcia got to work with Hwang as an unpolished gem, with the forward having rejected advances from clubs in his homeland to move to Europe and sign for Salzburg a month short of his 19th birthday.
“When he was child, he was very famous in youth football society,” says Gun Lee, a journalist with Korean newspaper Sports Chosun, who attends most Wolves games to relay Hwang’s achievements to the audience back home.
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“In 2008, he helped his team, Singok Elementary School, become national champions and in another competition he had the Golden Boot. He had a lot of awards when he was child and teenager.
“In 2009 he was awarded first prize in the Cha Bum-kun football awards, started by the Bundesliga legend Cha Bum-kun. A lot of famous Korean footballers were awarded this when they were teenagers such as Park Ji-sung and Ki Sung-yueng.
“Due to his good performance, lots of European teams watched him and he moved to Salzburg in December 2014.”
After a loan spell at Liefering, effectively Salzburg’s reserve side who play in the second tier of Austrian football, Hwang registered 28 goals and 17 assists in 86 appearances, including 52 starts, in the Austrian Bundesliga.
Two goals in 20 games followed for Hamburg during a loan spell in Germany’s second tier, and in 2020 he moved to RB Leipzig, Salzburg’s Red Bull ‘stablemates’ in the German Bundesliga. The move did not go as planned on the field, with Hwang starting just three times in the league and not managing a single goal. Injuries and competition in attack worked against him.
A move to Wolves followed in 2021 and he started with a bang, scoring on his debut in a 2-0 win against Watford and managing four goals in his first six Premier League appearances. But just four more came in the next 51 league games for Wolves, where niggling injuries continued to dog him.
After Wolves made his move permanent last summer, he has been a regular starter when fit for Bruno Lage, Julen Lopetegui and now Gary O’Neil.
His work rate and ability to follow tactical instructions to the letter make him an attractive option for coaches, and this season he has begun to be rewarded in front of goal with O’Neil’s team able to offer him more regular chances.
“The reason he’s scored so many goals is down to him, not really to me,” says O’Neil. “He’s got big quality. Hopefully, the structure of the team has helped him. I think it has — and how diligently he follows that.
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“He knows when to be in certain areas and when not to. He doesn’t take much managing, which is good for me because you do run out of hours sometimes as a manager. He’s very good at managing himself.
“The team is set up to move up the pitch in a certain way. He knows that if he follows it, there will be a goalscoring chance if he arrives in a certain area. He doesn’t get disappointed. If he gets there 10 times and ball doesn’t come, he’ll get there on the 11th.
“He’s shown the quality to put them away. Huge credit to him for the way he has gone about it. I’ve given him stuff I think helps him, but you only benefit if you buy into it and you have a lot of quality.”
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(Top photo by Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)