Supporters arrive at the stadium with drums, flags and organised chants. The atmosphere has the weight of a major occasion. Adults and children sit side by side in the stands. Fifty thousand people gathered around a shared ritual. Cameras are readied. The press tribune fills up. Everything else follows. Then twenty-two teenagers walk onto the pitch to play for Japan’s national high school championship.
Some become recognisable across the country before signing a professional contract. Daizen Maeda, Daichi Kamada and Reo Hatate all came through it. Back when Captain Tsubasa was on television, too many details seemed impossible. The enormous pitches. Bicycle kicks suspended in mid-air. Goalkeepers moving like superheroes. Those packed stands for a school semi-final played by seventeen-year-olds felt almost more implausible than the rest. They were also the most faithful.
Youth football in Japan followed a very different path from its Western counterpart. The national high school tournament fills stadiums, is broadcast across the country and remains one of the most watched school sporting events in the world. One detail that almost explains the growth of Japanese football on its own. The product of a long process. A cultural construction before it became a sporting one.
Today Japan is one of the most stable and modern national teams in world football. At the 2022 World Cup they beat Germany and Spain, finishing top of the tournament’s most demanding group. They were also the first nation, hosts excluded, to qualify for the 2026 World Cup. Hajime Moriyasu can draw on an increasingly large pool of players based in Europe. A Japanese footballer starring in the Premier League, the Bundesliga or the Champions League no longer feels unusual.
Japanese football has grown like a national infrastructure. No revolution. No defining generational superstar. Just time. Ten years ago the Japan Football Association launched Project DNA, a development programme conceived on a timescale more commonly associated with centuries-old institutions. The objective is to win the World Cup by 2092.
A project designed to outlast individuals. A permanent pipeline of talent, expertise and football culture. The J.League invested in far more than players. Academies, coaching education, infrastructure, television rights, supporter engagement, even executive training. From next season the Japanese league will also adopt a calendar aligned with the European schedule, making overseas transfers easier and bringing the domestic system further into sync with the wider football world.
Europe remains football’s only true centre of gravity. Japan chose to absorb methods and knowledge from it. At one point J.League executives travelled to study West Ham, regarded as a reference point for the development of young players and the cultivation of individual strengths. Terry Westley, the long-serving academy director, later became an important figure in the technical evolution of Japanese football.
European expertise was expected to solve a specific problem: greater flexibility in coaching methods. Talent developing through different pathways, at different rhythms. Contemporary Japanese players look noticeably different from previous generations. More creative. More aggressive. More naturally suited to European football.
Then there is Belgium. Sint-Truiden, acquired by Japanese ownership in 2017, has become a gateway to Europe. Wataru Endo, Daichi Kamada, Zion Suzuki and Takehiro Tomiyasu all passed through it. For many young Japanese footballers it represents an ideal first encounter with Western football: competitive enough to accelerate development, protected enough to avoid talent being overwhelmed at first contact with a different ecosystem.
There are economic reasons behind the growing interest European clubs show in Japanese players. Transfer fees remain relatively accessible. Technical preparation and tactical education are often of a very high standard.
Modern football increasingly demands qualities long associated with Japan: organised intensity, intelligent pressing, rational occupation of space, speed of decision-making. For years Japan was described as disciplined but naïve, elegant but fragile. Today it is aggressive, sophisticated, modern. A national team that wants to dominate the pitch and the opponent.
Japanese football has become global without ever really abandoning its identity. European in many of its structures, reshaped according to domestic needs, adapted to a different cultural context. At the World Cup in North America there will be no Tsubasa Ozora leaping towards the sun. Instead, a compact, organised team.