The J.League Expands — Beyond Gender, Beyond Borders

The J.League, having put down deep roots in its communities, came at a certain point to carry another great question. Was the ideal of being rooted in the community really meant for ‘men’s football’ alone? And was this ideal something that could be completed only within the borders of a country called Japan? Over thirty years, the J.League quietly but surely pushed outward the lines that defined it. It crossed the wall of gender, crossed the wall of national borders, and in the end crossed even the boundary of the sport of football itself, reaching out into society. In this ninth episode, we follow the story of the J.League expanding.

The WE League — The Day Women’s Football Turned Professional

While the J.League was changing the world of men’s football, women’s football in Japan faced a wall that long went uncrossed.

In 2011, when Nadeshiko Japan stood at the summit of the world at the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the whole country was thrilled. At the London Olympics the following year, in 2012, they took the runner-up spot, and there was a time when crowds poured in to watch women’s football. Yet that heat did not last. The league meant to receive it — the so-called Nadeshiko League — remained within an amateur framework, and many of the players played while balancing their jobs with the sport. Even players who had become the best in the world found it hard to make a living from football alone. And so the top players flowed out, one after another, to the professional leagues of Europe and America.

To change this reality, the Japan Football Association set itself in motion. In 2019 it established a preparatory office for founding a new women’s league and worked out its vision. Then, in June 2020, it was announced that Japan’s first women’s professional football league would be named the WE League — said to be short for Women Empowerment League.

When the time came in September 2021, the WE League kicked off with eleven clubs. The ideal it raised went beyond winning and losing at football. Through women’s football and sport, to contribute to realizing a society overflowing with dreams and diverse ways of living, in which each and every person shines — that was the aim. Just as the men’s J.League had raised the banner of community rootedness, it was the moment a women’s league raised the banner of transforming society itself.

Toward Asia — A J.League That Crosses Borders

Another wall the J.League pushed outward was the national border.

The trigger, it is said, was a single sense of crisis. As the population of Japan declined, for the J.League to keep growing into the future, it needed to turn its gaze outward. Thinking this way, the J.League launched an Asia Strategy Office in 2012 and stepped out into the countries of Southeast Asia — Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, and more.

The first step was broadcasting rights. To have J.League matches watched on local television and the internet. At the same time, by having J.League clubs sign players from Southeast Asia, to give the fans of those countries a sense of closeness — ‘a player from my own country is fighting in Japan.’ These steady efforts eventually led to visible results.

Thailand, above all, became a success story that symbolized the J.League’s Asia strategy. Interest in the J.League in Thailand, which had been below twenty percent around 2013, is reported to have later risen to roughly half. The state in which one in every two Thai people takes an interest in the J.League was proof that the heat of the J.League had carried across the sea. The broadcasting-rights fees for Thailand grew greatly with each contract renewal, and overseas broadcasting-rights revenue is said to have swelled to many times what it once had been.

Of course, not everything went smoothly. There are also countries, like Vietnam, where the culture of paying money for pay broadcasting has not yet taken root. The J.League positioned such countries as markets with promise for the future, even if they would not become large revenue sources right away, and cultivated those relationships with a long view.

Sharen — Beyond Football, Into Society

The last thing the J.League reached for, having crossed the wall of gender and the wall of national borders, lay outside the sport of football itself.

Looking back, from its very founding in 1993, J.League clubs had been charged with hometown activities — efforts such as contributing to the community and protecting the environment. The ideal of being rooted in the community had, from the very start, meant ‘enriching the community through football.’ In time, these activities grew into a larger form. It is an initiative called Sharen! — J.League social collaboration.

What Sharen aimed at was for clubs, together not only with themselves but with local businesses, municipalities, schools, and residents, to tackle regional problems such as education, health, town-building, diversity, and intergenerational exchange. Three or more parties joining hands to create shared value — football clubs were becoming platforms for solving the problems of their communities.

Its scale was by no means a small thing. As reported, the social-collaboration and hometown activities of J.League clubs as a whole are said to number in the thousands, or even more, per year. Not stopping at football classes for children, but reaching to health-building for the elderly, environmental conservation, support for disaster-stricken areas — a club’s emblem became, at the same time as a flag for competing over victory and defeat, a flag that drew close to the problems of the town.

In 2021, it was also reported that the J.League concluded a partnership agreement with the Ministry of the Environment, going on to advance community-rooted efforts including measures against climate change. A football league joining hands even with a nation’s environmental policy — that tells of how broad the reach of the Hundred-Year Vision that the J.League had drawn from the beginning truly was.

In this way, the J.League changed from its starting point as a single league of men’s football into something that gave birth to a women’s professional league, spread its fans across Asia, and stepped even into the social problems of communities. Perhaps it was the figure of the dream that Saburo Kawabuchi and the others had pictured thirty years ago, grown beyond even what those very people had imagined.

A J.League that reached beyond gender, beyond borders, and even into the problems of society. So what will these thirty years of progress leave behind for the next thirty? And what, exactly, was the thing the J.League truly handed to a country called Japan? At last, the final episode, toward the future of the J.League.