The Next Thirty Years — What the J.League Left to Japan

On May 15, 1993, a single league gave its first cry into the night sky of the National Stadium. That day, the J.League set sail with just ten teams, and from there it experienced a boom and a collapse, returned to its ideals, put down roots in its communities, crossed gender and national borders, and walked all the way to here. Over the span of thirty years, what did the J.League accomplish, and what did it leave behind? At the end of this series, while gazing at the next thirty years of the J.League, I would like to ask once more what it was that this revolution truly handed to a country called Japan.

From Ten to Sixty — Thirty Years Told by the Numbers

What speaks most eloquently of the J.League’s thirty years is, most likely, the number of clubs.

This league, which began with ten teams in 1993, had increased its number of clubs to sixty by the time it marked its 30th anniversary in 2023. As reported, of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures, the number without a J.League club had come down to just six. From Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south, in almost every region of Japan, a professional club of one’s own town exists. A scene no one could have imagined thirty years ago had become an ordinary part of the landscape.

This is not merely a story of teams increasing in number. In the towns where clubs were born, stadiums came to be, football schools came to be, and places where people gathered every weekend came to be. Children grew up admiring not the star players on the other side of the television but the club of their own town. Professional football melted into the daily life of the Japanese.

The dream that first chairman Saburo Kawabuchi spoke of in his opening declaration thirty years ago — to create a hundred clubs across the country, to build facilities nationwide centered on them where people of all ages and genders could enjoy sport at any time, and to turn elementary-school grounds to grass for the sake of children — this J.League Hundred-Year Vision had, at the halfway turning point of thirty years, become reality up to its midpoint.

Toward the World, and Toward a New Calendar

The matured J.League now stands, it is said, before a new challenge.

One such challenge is the shift to an autumn-to-spring calendar. Until now, the J.League has fought on a calendar that opens in February and closes in December. Yet many of Europe’s major leagues adopt an autumn-to-spring calendar that opens at the end of summer and closes in the spring of the following year. To bring its pace into step with the world’s transfer market and calendar, the J.League decided at its board meeting in December 2023 to shift to an autumn-to-spring calendar, and it is reported that it will begin marking a new calendar from the season spanning 2026 to 2027.

Of course, this was not an easy decision. Japan has no small number of regions that hold winters covered in snow. For clubs in snowfall regions, holding matches in midwinter becomes a great burden. The J.League is said to have prepared support measures to back up such clubs, yet even so, to change the calendar meant to reassemble once more the ordinary state of Japanese football, built up over thirty years.

The distance from the world, too, has greatly narrowed over these thirty years. The J.League, which once was on the side that welcomed famous overseas players, has now become a supply source that sends players out into the world. Many of the Japanese players fighting on Europe’s front lines began their stories from a J.League pitch. The J.League became the foundation that pushed Japanese football up to a world standard.

What the J.League Left to Japan

The problems left behind, too, are by no means small.

The management of clubs is still not easy. There are great gaps between clubs in attendance and revenue, and the road for small regional clubs to keep surviving is a steep one. Compared with the world’s top leagues, the scale of broadcasting rights and the salaries of players still hold a great gap. Chairman Yoshikazu Nonomura is said to be showing a stance of facing, together with social responsibility, problems such as efforts toward an environment aiming to be the world’s cleanest league, and the development not only of players but of the people who carry management.

Even so — when one looks back over the span of thirty years, what the J.League left to Japan was something that cannot be measured by victories and defeats or the number of titles.

It is the pride of ‘our own club.’ In towns thought to have no connection to professional football, flags of green, of orange, of red and black were raised. When the weekend comes, people across generations gather in the same stadium, wear the same colors, and share joy and sorrow on the nights they won and the nights they lost alike. Football became, not just a sport, but a device that connects the people of a region, the dream of children, and the pride of a town.

These thirty years, which began from the empty stadiums of the JSL, handed to a country called Japan a culture that had not existed until then — ‘professional sport rooted in the community.’ That, precisely, was the greatest work the revolution called the J.League accomplished. Over the next thirty years, the clubs of the J.League will increase further, and their flags will fly over still more towns. The story is not yet over.

On that night in 1993, the light that was lit in the National Stadium spread across the country over thirty years. It was one great story that began from one man’s dream and was raised by the hands of the people of countless towns. Over the next thirty years too, the J.League will surely keep being someone’s pride, in some town somewhere in Japan.

To you, who read all the way to the end. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for accompanying this journey across all ten episodes. If the trajectory by which the J.League changed Japanese football, and the towns of Japan, was able to leave something in your heart, there is no greater joy than this.

【The J.League: 30 Years That Changed Japanese Football — End】