{"id":11660,"date":"2026-08-14T12:14:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T12:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/im-a-collector.com\/non-categorise\/in-deapth-ao-ashi-how-japan-develops-its-future-professional-footballers\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T15:08:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T15:08:22","slug":"ao-ashi-japanese-football-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/im-a-collector.com\/en\/memory-legacy\/ao-ashi-japanese-football-development\/","title":{"rendered":"[In-deapth] Ao Ashi: how Japan develops its future professional footballers"},"content":{"rendered":"In-depth series From Captain Tsubasa\u2019s dream to Blue Lock\u2019s ambition: how Japan became a football nation<\/a> \u2014 episode 4 of 9<\/span>\n\n

After Captain Tsubasa told the story of the dream, Whistle! explored selection, Hungry Heart the difficulty of turning football into a career, and Giant Killing the inner workings of a club, Japanese football manga was ready to move behind the scenes of player development. We always see the footballer when he steps onto the pitch; we see far less of the years in which others have assessed his strengths, corrected his weaknesses, decided where he should play and, at times, whether he still has a chance of becoming a professional. In 2015, Ao Ashi chose to focus on those almost invisible years, asking a far more complex question: how do you actually develop a professional footballer? <\/p>\n\n

Ashito Aoi is a striker: he loves scoring goals and wants to become a professional. When he joins the Esperion academy, he still assumes that improving mainly means getting better in the role he has chosen for himself. But the coaches around him see more. They notice what he spots before others, what he still fails to understand, the habits holding him back, and the role his abilities might allow him to play a few years down the line. <\/p>\n\n

Ashito\u2019s experience also reflects a very real shift. Between the 1980s and the mid-2010s, Japanese football profoundly changed the way it supported young players. Professional clubs entered their development much earlier, federation programmes gradually expanded, coach education became more structured, and several pathways learned to coexist rather than replace one another. <\/p>\n\n

Ao Ashi arrived when this environment had become rich enough to sustain a story of its own. Behind the familiar question of the manga\u2019s realism lies another, more revealing one: why did Japan feel the need to teach young players not only to play football better, but to understand it better as well? <\/p>\n\n

Japan was already developing players before the J.League<\/h2>\n\n

It would be easy to begin this story in 1993, with the launch of Japan\u2019s professional league. Yet when Captain Tsubasa began in 1981, schools and universities already played a major role in player development. The Japan Football Association also had its own talent-identification structure: a Central Training Centre had existed since 1977 and became the National Training Centre in 1980. The best young players could therefore already be brought together periodically to train in a more demanding environment. <\/p>\n\n

What the J.League changes above all is the role of the club. For a long time, top-level teams recruited heavily from high schools, universities and company teams. With professionalisation, a club can begin working with a teenager several years before a possible promotion to the first team. <\/p>\n\n

The development of U-15 and U-18 categories changes the relationship between training and the profession. A club no longer simply waits for a player to be ready: it follows his development over time. It works with him across several seasons and can decide for itself whether he has the level to continue. This approach becomes more structured in the early 2000s, with the J.League\u2019s Player Development Project launched in 2001 and the Academy Project in 2002. Seven clubs serve as model structures, including Kashima Antlers, FC Tokyo, Yokohama F. Marinos and Gamba Osaka. <\/p>\n\n

Japan does not, however, move towards a single pathway. High-school football remains important, as does university football, while JFA programmes continue in parallel. Professional academies are added to this increasingly coherent system, creating a more direct route into the profession without erasing the others. <\/p>\n\n

The U-18 Premier League, created in 2011, is a clear example of this coexistence: the best high-school teams and the leading club academies can now meet regularly in the same competition. A player can develop in different environments, move from one to another, and reach the J.League without following exactly the same route as the player beside him. <\/p>\n\n

Within this system, the word \u80b2\u6210 (ikusei<\/em>), meaning player development, becomes central. Identifying talent is no longer enough. That talent has to be developed, its strengths understood, its limitations corrected and, at times, guided towards a role the player had never imagined for himself. <\/p>\n\n

In the early 2010s, this is the part of Japanese football Shogakukan chooses to explore, far from the far more familiar setting of major high-school tournaments: J-youth.<\/p>\n\n

\"Cover
Cover of Ao Ashi Volume 3 (\u00a9 2015 Yugo Kobayashi, Naohiko Ueno \/ Shogakukan)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

Why Ao Ashi chooses an academy over high school<\/h2>\n\n

The academy setting was not Y\u016bgo Kobayashi\u2019s original idea. It first emerged at Shogakukan, where Katsunobu Ogino was looking for a new football manga for Big Comic Spirits. Football was not short of stories; the challenge was to find a different place from which to tell one. <\/p>\n\n

Ogino became interested in the Takamado JFA U-18 League and discovered a competition in which two traditions met: high-school teams and youth sides attached to professional clubs. While researching the latter, he repeatedly encountered the term ikusei<\/em>. Player development gradually stopped being a secondary element and became the subject of the project itself. <\/p>\n\n

By the early 2010s, J-youth structures were established enough to form an entire world of their own, with selections, coaches, age groups and close links to the first team. Yet they remained far less prominent in the manga imagination than school football. When presenting Ao Ashi\u2019s first volume, Shogakukan would itself emphasise this journey into a world that manga had rarely explored in depth. <\/p>\n\n

Kobayashi was not chosen as a football specialist. His previous manga, Tenman \u00e0 la carte, had mainly shown his appetite for research and an energy close to sports storytelling. When the project was proposed to him, he hesitated. Rereading Giant Killing helped him realise that a football manga could still find its place without simply repeating the familiar formulas of high school and knockout tournaments. <\/p>\n\n

The team then researched both sides of the system, visiting several J-youth structures as well as school teams. The academy is not presented as the modern, superior replacement for high-school football. Both pathways continue to produce professional players. For the story, however, J-youth gives greater weight to the decisions made around a player: a training session, a selection or a conversation with a coach can directly affect his future. <\/p>\n\n

Choosing Ashito makes it possible to discover this world without turning the manga into a theoretical lesson. Early in the project, Y\u016bma Motoki had been considered as the main protagonist. But Y\u016bma grew up through the academy\u2019s younger age groups and already understands its codes. Ashito, arriving from Ehime with no experience of J-youth, has everything to learn. An instruction that is obvious to Y\u016bma has to be understood, tested and absorbed by Ashito. The reader therefore discovers Esperion at the same pace he does. <\/p>\n\n

His background also creates a link with Kobayashi, who was himself born in Ehime and is attached to Ehime FC. But the most revealing parallel appears when the mangaka explains what he wants to portray: boys trying to become professionals remind him of his own obsession when he was trying to become a manga artist, with the same uncertainty over whether he could truly turn that ambition into a career. <\/p>\n\n

At Esperion, Ashito is confronted directly with that uncertainty. Coaches watch him play and try to imagine what he might become. And Fukuda\u2019s first major decision will overturn the future Ashito had imagined for himself. <\/p>\n\n

When Ao Ashi returns to EhimeIn 2023, Ao Ashi returned directly to the home ground of both Ashito and Y\u016bgo Kobayashi with an exhibition organised by Ehime FC in collaboration with Shogakukan, the city of Iyo and its Board of Education. <\/strong>The main exhibition ran at Michi-no-Eki Futami in Iyo from 18 November to 3 December. More than 100 reproductions of manga pages and character panels were displayed free of charge, while original artwork was also shown at several Ehime FC home matches at Ningineer Stadium. <\/strong>The event went beyond a conventional manga exhibition. It connected the work with the region where Ashito was born, and with a real professional club. During the 11 November match against FC Imabari, the world of Ao Ashi entered the stadium itself through an exhibition, special activities and a live performance by Rin\u97f3, who performs the anime ending theme \u201cBlue Diary\u201d. <\/strong>A few years after using Japanese football as material for its story, Ao Ashi thus became a means of connecting a club, a work and the place it represents.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

\"Ashito
Ashito Aoi discovering the Esperion academy for the first time<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

The player Ashito never expected to become<\/h2>\n\n

When Ashito arrives at Esperion, he has no doubt about his position. He is a striker, he scores goals, and he imagines his future in front of the opposition goal. Fukuda, however, tells him that he sees him as a full-back. <\/p>\n\n

The switch is neither improvised nor the result of a later rewrite. It was already part of the project before publication began. During the club research, Katsunobu Ogino repeatedly heard people stress how important the full-back position could become in the evolution of Japanese football. He and Kobayashi began building their future protagonist around that idea. <\/p>\n\n

There was one obvious problem: a teenager who dreams from the first page of becoming Japan\u2019s best full-back is less likely to capture readers\u2019 imagination than a striker obsessed with scoring. Young players are also sometimes moved from attack into wide positions. Ashito can therefore begin with a familiar dream before the academy calls his ambitions into question: are his greatest strengths really where he thinks they are? <\/p>\n\n

At first, the change feels like a demotion to him. He ties his identity as a player to attacking and measures progress by scoring more goals. Esperion sees his potential differently. The aim is no longer to make him the best striker he can be, but to understand how his qualities might take him to professional level. <\/p>\n\n

His overall vision of the pitch becomes central. In the earliest ideas for the character, Kobayashi had imagined an ability much closer to a manga power, almost the capacity to \u201csee the future\u201d. Contact with real football reshaped the idea into a more credible awareness of positions and movement, with Xavi cited among the references used in refining it. <\/p>\n\n

Kobayashi therefore keeps a trait distinctive enough to carry a manga protagonist while asking what it could mean in a real match. Ashito may see more than other players, but he still has to learn how to interpret what he sees. <\/p>\n\n

Fukuda is not asking him to abandon his talent, but to make it useful somewhere else. What first seemed like a natural gift has to become a repeatable skill, tied to a position, to responsibilities and to a much broader reading of the game. <\/p>\n\n

An academy can therefore challenge the identity a player has built for himself. The desire remains personal, but a professional trajectory is also shaped through the judgement of coaches who can imagine what a particular quality might produce several years later. <\/p>\n\n

For Ashito, progress means accepting a difficult idea: becoming a professional may not depend on becoming the player he dreamed of being, but the one he never imagined becoming.<\/p>\n\n

From this point on, Kobayashi is less interested in the position itself than in everything Ashito needs in order to play it: observing, anticipating, deciding and understanding what is happening before he even touches the ball.<\/p>\n\n

\"In
Scene from the Ao Ashi manga in which Fukuda tells Ashito Aoi that he must switch to full-back (Ao Ashi \u00a9 2015 Yugo Kobayashi, Naohiko Ueno \/ Shogakukan)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

Learning to think like a professional<\/h2>\n\n

Changing Ashito\u2019s position is not enough. Fukuda has to teach him why the new role can work and how to use a view of the pitch that is still largely instinctive. <\/p>\n\n

Ao Ashi dwells on a part of football that images struggle to show: everything that happens before the action itself. The glance over a shoulder before receiving the ball, a teammate\u2019s run that opens space, body orientation, an opponent\u2019s position, or a decision made several seconds before the pass is actually played. <\/p>\n\n

This idea was present from the manga\u2019s conception. One member of the editorial team recalled enjoying Japan national-team matches while sometimes feeling lost when more knowledgeable fans discussed positioning or off-the-ball movement. Not every editor arrived with a coach\u2019s vocabulary either. They learned through their research and realised that Ashito could give the reader the same progression. <\/p>\n\n

The character is particularly well suited to this. He has instinct and an unusual perception of the pitch, but still lacks the vocabulary and reference points needed to organise what he perceives. Ashito can read a situation correctly without being able to explain why. A mistake, a coach\u2019s comment or another attempt can therefore move both player and reader forward at the same time. <\/p>\n\n

To understand what happens in the minds of the best players, Kobayashi asks them directly. His conversations with Kengo Nakamura are especially revealing. He does not simply ask what pass Nakamura would make in a given situation. He wants to know what Nakamura was thinking at the exact moment of the decision: what he had already looked at, what he was anticipating, and which information triggered the choice. <\/p>\n\n

The exercise forces the former Japan international to put into words mechanisms that had become almost automatic after years at the highest level. An action is easy to see on video. Reconstructing the reasoning that came before it requires far more work, especially when the player himself no longer consciously verbalises that reasoning every time he acts. <\/p>\n\n

Kobayashi then turns this material into scenes. Ao Ashi\u2019s tactics are not based only on diagrams or principles learned from books; the manga tries to make an often tacit form of knowledge readable: how an experienced player gathers information and narrows the possible choices before the ball even reaches him. <\/p>\n\n

These explanations matter when they produce a visible effect in Ashito: a space he had not noticed becomes obvious, a run that seemed pointless gains a purpose, a decision that used to come too late is made a few seconds earlier. Kobayashi himself has stressed that real football will always be richer than anything a manga can reproduce, and that his first objective remains to tell the stories of characters. <\/p>\n\n

The work with Nakamura even produced an unexpected effect. By putting his own perceptions into words in response to Kobayashi\u2019s questions, the former player says he organised certain concepts that he could then reuse when working with young players. The manga draws from the pitch and, in this particular case, the work required to write it also ends up feeding back into real football. <\/p>\n\n

Kobayashi is therefore not only trying to find out what a good player does. He wants to understand how that player arrives at the decision. <\/p>\n\n

Ashito progresses when he begins to cross that threshold. His view of the pitch gradually stops being an intuition and becomes an organised way of reading the game. At Esperion, he is no longer asked simply to see the right thing: he is asked to know why. <\/p>\n\n

\"Ashito
Ashito Aoi performs an acrobatic bicycle kick in this image from the Ao Ashi manga. (Ao Ashi \u00a9 2015 Yugo Kobayashi, Naohiko Ueno \/ Shogakukan) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

An academy promises nothing<\/h2>\n\n

Being selected by a J.League academy means having passed several stages and being judged promising enough to train there. It does not, however, guarantee that a place in the first team is waiting at the end. <\/p>\n\n

University can extend a player\u2019s development and provide several additional years before another attempt to reach the J.League. Some players move directly from U-18 football into the first team; others become professionals later after university or school football. <\/p>\n\n

Esperion lives with that uncertainty. Ashito develops among teenagers chasing the same goal, all of them watched by the same coaches. Entering an academy also means discovering that almost everyone around you was already among the best players somewhere else. <\/p>\n\n

Work remains essential, but it offers no protection from everything else. Far from it.<\/strong> A player may develop too slowly, fall behind, fail to match the needs of a position, or find that a coach imagines a different future for him. Development therefore also means assessing, redirecting and sometimes letting players go. <\/p>\n\n

Japan retains several pathways in which high school, university and academy football can follow one another or intersect. A door closing at one point does not always end a player\u2019s professional ambitions. It is from within this hybrid system that Japan looks towards Europe and asks what might further improve its player development. <\/p>\n\n

Being in an academy does not mean becoming a professional Early selection is no guarantee of a professional career. Joining a J.League club\u2019s youth academy brings a young player closer to the professional game, but never guarantees that they will make it there. A Japanese study of 38 third-year players from youth setups offers some perspective. Ten moved directly into the professional game, while 27 continued their development at university. The sample is too small to establish a national rate, but it shows that spending several years in a club academy does not automatically lead to a professional contract. The system can therefore support players, guide their development and create more opportunities, but it cannot remove the competition and even less the uncertainty.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

\"Key
Ashito Aoi surrounded by several Tokyo City Esperion A-team players \u2014 key visual for Season 2 of the anime (\u00a9 Yugo Kobayashi, Shogakukan \/ Ao Ashi Season 2 Production Committee)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

What Japan looks for in Europe<\/h2>\n\n

Europe had already fuelled the dream of Captain Tsubasa. Thirty years later, it is no longer only the place where Japan\u2019s best players hope to compete. The JFA also looks there for methods of player development. <\/p>\n\n

France provides one of the clearest examples. In 2005, the JFA entered into a partnership with the French Football Federation. When JFA Academy Fukushima opened the following year, the influence of Clairefontaine was explicitly acknowledged: young talents would be brought together in an environment where training, schooling and daily life could be planned as a whole over several years. <\/p>\n\n

Japan then expanded these exchanges. The partnership signed with Spain in 2010 included coach education, while cooperation with Germany the following year covered player and coach development. Rather than choosing a single European model, Japanese football compared its own system with several reference points and adopted what it considered useful. <\/p>\n\n

Esperion does not, however, correspond to any real Japanese structure \u2014 at least, none that I was able to identify clearly during my research. <\/p>\n\n

A Japanese model is not a copy of Europe <\/strong>Japan did not replace high-school football with academies. Comparing the Japanese system with that of a European country can be particularly misleading, precisely because Japan\u2019s defining feature is the coexistence of several pathways: club academies, high-school football, universities and federation programmes all continue to feed the elite game. <\/strong>Exchanges with Clairefontaine, Spain and Germany brought methods and reference points, but they did not erase that history. A young Japanese player can still reach the J.League through very different routes. <\/strong>That is also what makes Esperion interesting: the academy portrayed in Ao Ashi belongs to a Japanese football culture that has looked towards Europe for years without simply reproducing its organisation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Barcelona, by contrast, becomes much more important later, when Kobayashi deepens his research in Spain and directly compares Japanese development with one of the world\u2019s leading references for youth football.<\/p>\n\n

Xavi also plays a part in the manga\u2019s development: his name is used as a reference when Ashito\u2019s overall vision is reworked into something credible on a football pitch. Fukuda\u2019s career in Spain, meanwhile, officially draws on the path of former professional Kenji Fukuda without turning the character into a strictly faithful portrait of the player. <\/p>\n\n

Europe therefore serves mainly as a point of comparison. Japanese football asks what it can learn from the most advanced structures, then how its own players measure up against those who have grown within them. <\/p>\n\n

In the 1980s, Europe was above all a destination for Tsubasa to reach. In Ao Ashi, the comparison begins long before departure: it concerns the way a teenager in Japan is identified, trained and prepared. <\/p>\n\n

Between the two works, Japanese football built enough structures, methods and knowledge for the years of a player\u2019s development to carry a story in their own right.<\/p>\n\n

And where does Captain Tsubasa fit into all this? When Ao Ashi begins in 2015, Captain Tsubasa is still continuing its own story. Y\u014dichi Takahashi is then working on Captain Tsubasa: Rising Sun, a series launched in Grand Jump at the end of 2013. Publication was interrupted for several months between November 2014 and July 2015. But Tsubasa is now far removed from the middle-school student introduced in 1981. He has left Japan, plays for FC Barcelona and has already helped the club win the Spanish league. In Rising Sun, he rejoins Japan\u2019s golden generation as captain of the U-23 national team with a new objective: Olympic gold in Madrid. The contrast with Ashito is striking. At the very moment Ashito is only beginning to discover the demands of a professional academy, Tsubasa is already playing for Bar\u00e7a and leading Japan on the international stage. In 2015, Takahashi is therefore showing how far the dream can take a Japanese player. Kobayashi chooses to go much further back: to the point when nobody yet knows whether that dream will become a profession. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

\"Ashito
Ashito Aoi looks up at the sky, in an image that leaves his future \u2014 and the fulfilment of his dream \u2014 open to question.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

What Ao Ashi finally makes visible<\/h2>\n\n

By 2015, Ao Ashi can therefore tell a story Captain Tsubasa had little reason to show thirty-four years earlier: everything that happens between the moment a child dreams of becoming a professional and the moment a club decides that he might actually be able to become one.<\/p>\n\n

Kobayashi gathers his material in academies, from coaches, and even from the way players such as Kengo Nakamura think. The manga\u2019s realism comes above all from this desire to understand the decisions that gradually shape a player: why he is moved to another position, what is expected of him without the ball, how an ability becomes useful, and when a coach decides that a player can cope at professional level. <\/p>\n\n

Ashito remains a manga hero. He has exceptional abilities, develops quickly and passes through situations constructed for the story. Yet talent alone does not explain his trajectory. He must constantly be observed, corrected, tested and sometimes contradicted by people who possess knowledge he has not yet acquired. <\/p>\n\n

Between the child and the professional now stand clubs, coaches, academies, competitions, selections and several possible routes to the top level. Ao Ashi chooses to look at this period, when the player is still only a possibility. A rough diamond that still has to be cut. <\/p>\n\n

It was while tracing this history from Captain Tsubasa onwards that I noticed a gap emerging in this dossier. So far, almost every player we have discussed has been male <\/p>\n\n

Japanese football also has a women\u2019s history, however, with its own structures, its own obstacles and a national team that became world champions in 2011. One year after Ao Ashi began, Naoshi Arakawa launched Sayonara Watashi no Cramer, a manga about women\u2019s football and a generation of players also trying to find their place. <\/p>\n\n

After following how Japan learned to develop its future professionals, the next part of this dossier must therefore look at the other half of the pitch: what place has Japanese football really built for its women players, and why did manga take so long to tell their story?<\/p>\n\n

\n\n

Sources<\/h3>\n\n

Player development and the organisation of Japanese football<\/h4>\n\n