Alex Stewart assesses the Asian talent factory and shows why there is value in looking east

Earlier this month, we published an excellent piece by Mohamed Mohamed on Ligue 2, which he called “Europe’s most underrated talent factory”. Mohamed made a number of important observations in the piece’s introduction, which are worth quoting here:

“By and large, football clubs have become smarter with how they approach squad building. In particular, there’s a greater understanding on age curves and projecting how players either transition into their primes or age out of it, depending on their archetype. Mega money transfers for players in their late 20s have become almost something of a taboo (especially in the online community), a stark contrast to where things were as recently as a few years ago. There’s perhaps an argument that the pendulum has swung too far and upper echelon prospects are at an absolute premium, at the expense of early-mid prime players.”

Mohamed also observes that, “Because clubs are learning from past mistakes, it means that greater ingenuity must be had to find quality talents.” The aim is, or should be, to “successfully thread the needle of finding starter quality talents in the present who could also generate sizable transfer fees in the future”.

Mohamed suggested, for various well-sustained reasons, that Ligue 2 is a good place to try to do that (he also reminded me I should do some more work on transfer flows); I would argue that Japan’s J1 League also hits both marks in terms of starter talent and future fees.

Recent track record

Leagues certainly have their moments. While Mohamed’s piece shows there is still huge value in Ligue 2, it first came to prominence because of Leicester’s work there ahead of the 2015/16 title win. Bundesliga 2 became trendy when Brentford and others started using it to find undervalued strikers and midfield pressing machines. J1 League is certainly not either of those brackets (yet?), but since the success of Ange Postecoglu moving first to Celtic, and then Spurs, and the impact of some high profile Japanese players in Europe, it’s definitely being talked about. That said, if you look at the last five years, it’s really only Ange’s Celtic and the Belgian top tier who have so far put genuine, sustained investment into Japan as a primary acquisition market (rather than picking up players who have done well somewhere else first, most of whom came first to Belgium or Germany, but in dribs and drabs). Indeed, since 2018/19, no European league has signed more than five players from J1 League in one window (Jupiler Pro in 2023/24, excludes loans – it is worth noting that loans take that figure to 10 and those could all have options or requirements to buy).

Of the seven transfers listed for the 2024/25 with definite fees according to Transfermarkt, one (Kaishu Sano) is joining Mainz in the Bundesliga, one (Takumu Kawamura) is moving to the Austrian Bundesliga with RB Salzburg, and three are off to Belgium’s top tier, which has a deserved reputation as one of Europe’s three best leagues for developing then selling up – the remaining two are headed to big-spending Birmingham in League One and AZ Alkmar in the Eredivisie.

The average age of the seven is a pre-peak 24 but definitely not in what you might call wonderkid/hot prospect territory. Defensive midfielder Kawamura’s move is especially interesting in this context: the RB scouting machine is geared to finding U23s (in 2023/24 the only O23 signings were goalkeepers; in 2022/23, only incoming loanee Jérôme Onguéné, who had been at the club before, was O23). This implies two things, I think: RB Salzburg feel that pre-prime, rather than solely prospect, players from Japan are ready for European-level competition immediately (indeed, Kawamura has played 67% of starting minutes for RBS already), but there is still room for the player to develop and potentially be a saleable asset in the next few years.

Another interesting example from 2024/25 is Southampton’s acquisition of 21-year-old FC Toyko central midfielder Kuryu Matsuki, last year’s AFC Youth Player of the Year and the Japan U20s captain. Saints have been pretty explicit in their desire to recruit players that fit a ‘buy young, develop, sell high’ model; immediately following the Sport Republic acquisition this focussed on PL2 talents, but the club is clearly broadening its parameters (it should be noted that they also bought 24-year-old Japanese international full-back Yukinari Sugawara following four very impressive seasons with AZ Alkmar, a club has successfully worked in the Japanese market).

So where has this confidence come from, that Japanese players can step up? In 2023/24, only three Japanese players moved to European clubs for fees (two in Belgium and one to Celtic, another club that has successfully used the Japanese market on occasion) and only one of those, GK Zion Suzuki (Urawa Reds to Sint-Truiden) was a clear ‘prospect’ move. It’s too early to know with much confidence how they will pan out.

In 2022/23 it was four, with Daizen Maeda moving to Celtic, Ayase Ueda to Cercle Brugge, Ao Tanaka (who I flagged in a 2020 video for Tifo Football) to Fortuna Düsseldorf in BL2 (he’s now secured a move to Leeds United), and Hiroki Ito to Stuttgart. These players were all 23-24, cost at most €1.5m, and all have been pretty unqualified successes. Maeda has played regularly, become a crowd favourite, and won silverware in Glasgow. Ueda moved to Feyenoord where last season he played over 800 league minutes, scored five goals, and won the Dutch cup. Tanaka played over 1700 minutes three seasons in a row at Düsseldorf and has earned a move to the club who just missed out on PL football in the play-off last season. And Ito has just been bought by Bayern, having played over 2000 minutes for three consecutive seasons at Stuttgart. By any measure, these pre-peak acquisitions were both a sporting and a financial success: Tanaka’s sale profit was €3m, Ueda’s €6.7m, and Ito’s was a whopping €23.1m (Maeda hasn’t moved).

So the track record is there, if small: a growing secondary sales market and immediate sporting impact – Mohamed’s needle has been threaded, at least in these instances. One reason for this might be the physicality of the Japanese top tier. As our friends at SCOUTED Football point out: “Japan develops very technically gifted players, and that lends itself to high tempo, free-flowing football, which results in more high intensity actions, lots of players providing options off the ball, and more aggressive risk-taking.” That piece has a load more substantiating detail and is well worth reading. And in another SCOUTED piece, on prospect CB Kota Takai, Llew Davies says, “I think the J.LEAGUEs are among the best leagues to buy from, purely because the athletic level is so high. It’s much more physical than people generally understand. A lot of Japanese players come to Europe when they’re 23 or 24, because of a quirk of the Japanese system – most of them play through high-school and university football before going pro, meaning they arrive at a mature athletic level and can make an immediate impact.”

Lastly, it’s worth noting that in 2023, J1 League became a Band 5 league in the FA’s tiering system for GBE. This means that if a player playing in the J1 League has no other way of achieving the 15 points for a GBE and doesn’t match any of the other criteria to be considered an ESC player, simply playing more than five games in the J1 League would now be enough to sign for an English club as an ESC player (the AFC CL Elite remained a Band 3 continental competition). This means that effectively any J1 League player could be in play for English and Scottish clubs, irrespective of international appearances.

So, let’s see if we can find some more players ready to make the move (fwiw, we agree with SCOUTED that Kota Takai is a great shout, but as they have already covered him, we won’t). At the time of writing, J1 League is about 80% done for the season (it’s a summer league), so we have a good sample size of minutes. We will be looking at players aged 24 and under.

The players

Satoshi Tanaka (CM/DM, 22-years-old, Shonan Bellmare)

You know me – can’t ignore defensive midfielders named Tanaka. That said, I think youth international Satoshi Tanaka’s ceiling is a mite higher than his namesake Ao’s for a few reasons. He’s a high-quality node player, a kind of footballing point guard but with added creative production. Shonan Bellmare play a 3-1-4-2/5-3-2 where the four (wing backs and 8s) and two tend to stay pretty high, with some vertical movement from one of the 8s to help in deeper build-up. Tanaka is the go-between 6, constantly buzzing around to find the space to offer an option to the centre backs or wing backs to progress the ball, then drilling it up to the 8s or laying it wide. He’ll then move again, making sure he finds space to be an option to recycle (as per the clip below – he only doesn’t get the final pass because of a teammate passing a bit too slowly/weakly).

Tanaka is tidy (one of the highest forms of praise in my book), but his ability to find space is what is most impressive. He’s rarely in a cover shadow and while he’s not one to carry through a press all that effectively, his constant movement and scanning means he’s seldom trapped without at least one decent out pass. He can translate this ability into finding space in more aggressive positions, too, which is where his eye for a slide pass, a deft dink, or a cross comes into play. He’s remarkably creative for someone whose main function seems to be linking (he also takes corners, a nice bonus). In the below clip, he moves neatly then gathers the ball well, executes a nice, neat shift to get the ball on his left, and dinks in a dangerous back-post cross. Not exactly what you’d expect from a 6.

Physically he’s not the biggest or strongest, although he commits to challenges with gusto. He has good acceleration over short distances and a jaggy ability to shift his balance which helps with creating separation in tighter spaces. Because Shonan try to stretch the field he’s often left to cover quite a bit of ground in defensive transitions (although he gets the benefits of this in attacking transition or moving the ball between the thirds) and this can expose him. He would probably do well alongside a more defensive 6 or with some shuttlers who afford more protection in transition ahead of him. Because as a 6, he’s definitely not a ‘holding’ midfielder. Remember this piece on finding a new Frenkie de Jong? Now, Tanaka is not de Jong, but there are similarities in his passing range, his ability to conjure creative moments higher up the pitch, and his use in a zone of the pitch that’s more traditionally associated with other characteristics. Indeed, using the profile we used in the FDJ article, you can see that, compared to J1 League midfielders this season, Tanaka is FDJ without the carrying (and he’s still above league average there).

It’s also worth noting that Shonan are without doubt one of the weaker sides in the J1 League this season, so to put up these kind of percentiles playing for a side that is a tier below most of the teams in the league is doubly impressive. Interestingly, Tanaka had a spell in Belgium, on loan at KV Kortrijk, in 2022/23. He played a fairly undistinguished 900-odd minutes as a DM or CM, which perhaps bears out an inference from the SCOUTED article that players need a year or two more in Japan to reach the right athletic level to move to Europe more easily. Tanaka has put up at least 900 minutes in every J1 League season since he was 18, too, hitting over 2000 when he was 19 (2021) and this season (for three goals and four assists), as well as combined plus 2000 in the J1 League and Jupiler in 2022/23. That kind of consistency, coupled to the athletic development that he’s undergone, means that he’s far more likely to transition effectively (into a more suitable tactical fit, ideally) to European football now.

Junnosuke Suzuki (CB/DM, 21-years-old – Shonan Bellmare)

“It’s also worth noting that Shonan are without doubt one of the weaker sides in the J1 League this season”, I write, and promptly throw another Lemon Gas Stadium regular at you. But Suzuki, who plays on the left side of Shonan’s back three, is a progressive passing machine.

Having barely played in two previous seasons, he’s been a fixture this season since returning from a thigh injury and his silky passing and carrying allow Shonan to tilt their ball progression onto the left side, where he works well with our friend Satoshi to work clever one-twos or drives upfield with the ball at feet. A good example below shows him taking the ball facing goal, working a round-the-corner pass to Tanaka, taking the return and spreading play before offering a return pass. The switch doesn’t quite come off but Shonan retain possession from a position where you’d probably have expected the centre back to pass back to the keeper.

Suzuki excels at finding passes between the lines. He’s clearly both technically good and possesses awareness and vision. Here he threads a pass between four opposition players to work a clearance from a tight position; again, many might have just tried a lofted line pass.

Suzuki also can bring some longer passing to the party, although he tends to keep it short and neat.

From a defensive perspective, Suzuki is solid if unspectacular. He is above league average for interceptions and the quality of his 1v1 defending, although he can be a little rash pushing up to fill the space that Shonan leave in transition. Aerially, he is limited (that description is, perhaps, even kind). That said, his role in the Shonan defence does mitigate that as they tend to use Kim Min-tae as the stopper who pushes up to contest aerial balls. This probably limits him at elite level in a back two but his passing and carrying both indicate someone who could thrive at a top tier team using a back three. There’s scope to consider him as a 6 as well; in Shonan’s build-up he works well enough with Tanaka manipulating the space and bypassing the press that you could see that working as a genuine double pivot. Remember, too, that he is only 21 and so some of the technical aspects of his defending could well improve.

Sota Koshimichi (FB, 20-years-old – Sanfrecce Hiroshima)

Koshimichi is one of the higher ceiling players currently operating in J1 League, and that is largely a product of his physicality and versatility. Oddly, he’s largely been a substitute in his two senior seasons despite offering enormous dynamism going forwards (Sanfrecce Hiroshima are leading the league though, so stuff is clearly working). He’s operated at both right and left wing back but, perhaps strangely, the game I watched that most impressed me technically was when he played as a right-sided centre back in a club friendly against Stuttgart.

Koshimichi profiles like a winger-type full back, rather than an inverting, stabilising one, which is odd given how good he was at centre back in a three (he read the game well, spread the play sensibly, and used his physicality to defend space well). He receives the ball high, drives past defenders (although he can sometimes be eased off the ball mid-stride by more canny, older defenders), and gets the ball into the box dangerously. He has good acceleration and likes to knock the ball past a player then try to beat them for pace or go shoulder-to-shoulder, although he can also work more intelligent running angles too.

When operating on the left, Koshimichi can deliver almost as well off his weaker left foot, although these crosses are slightly more floated, but he offers the option to cut inside and chop crosses in as well, which means he’s in some ways more effective wrong-side because defenders don’t know which way he will go. His through passing is limited and he can get simple stuff wrong because of his head down, charge forward approach, but time will finesse that out and I would expect his short progressive passing and through passes to improve. Defensively he looks solid, with a good snappiness around the ball and the athletic ability to recover if he gets drawn out of position. When deployed as a CB in the Stuttgart game, he was able to jump effectively into the space left outside the wing back, and seldom looked out of place dropping off in the three when required either. Indeed, it was a more positionally mature performance than I had expected having previously watched his minutes as a marauding, athletic wing back.

Koshimichi seems well equipped to transition to a high standard of European football. He needs to add some of the finesse he showed as a CB to his wide game, although to be fair, he mostly comes on towards the tail-end of games playing for the most dominant attacking side in the league, so his exuberance is understandable.

Kota Tawaratsumida, LW, 20-years-old – FC Tokyo

It is interesting that it has been much easier to find pre-peak quality from 8 backwards (excluding goalkeepers, it must be noted); Japan doesn’t seem to be producing an enormous amount in the way of attacking talent at the moment. Shin Yamada (CF, 24-years-old, Kawasaki Frontale – 12 goals/two assists this season) and Taisei Miyashiro (AM/ST, 24-years-old, Vissel Kobe – 9 goals/one assist) both look pretty good, neither seem to have the tools to transition to a top-tier European side (although Miyashiro could do a job in, say, Belgium), which limits their buyability for those sides looking to thread the aforementioned needle.

An exception to this is Tawaratsumida, a raw, but pretty compelling, prospect on the wing for FC Toyko. His 0.24 GA per 90 is not exactly a remarkable output, but the 20-year-old looks to have a pretty high ceiling (if not quite on a par with the players above).

Coming off the back of over a 1000 minutes in this and last season, Tawaratsumida excels at dribbling and carrying, while his end product creatively is at elite level compared to other wingers and 10s in J1 League. His athletic tools allow him to burst into space and simply burn many players. Here is, up against the very rapid Sota Koshimichi from earlier in the article. While Koshimichi does close the gap a smidgen (partly due to geometry), Tawaratsumida is able to use his touch to keep himself and the ball out of reach enough to deliver a very collected pull back across the top of the box, showing fine vision to go with the pace.

Tawaratsumida is a busy winger, with a high volume of actions for his minutes. He is third for dribbles per 90 among wingers with over 600 minutes this season, 11th for key passes and 13th for crosses per 90. As his map below shows, he likes to stay pretty wide, hugging the touchline to drive onto passes up the line or receiving and turning to carry. He’ll chop infield to take on players if the room to run is there, but he seems to prefer simply bursting down the line and putting it into the box from wide.

Tawaratsumida’s open-field running style is strong, but he his can use his hip movement and acceleration to create separation with little bursts in tight areas. Here, he does this first in a more narrow space, but then also changes the angle again to assist.

Here’s another assist from wide (although the defender should really have done better to close).

Tawaratsumida also has the ability to pass smoothly through traffic, although this is less often deployed. Using his change of pace and swivel enough to create some space, but also realising he was about to get closed down by the other covering defender, Tawaratsumida takes out four defenders with a beautiful through ball. This kind of passing could be more a part of his repertoire, but his station on the touchline seldom affords him the chance to hit the kind of traffic that needs that sort of vision and delivery.

Any winger who is putting up the volume and quality of actions that Tawaratsumida does, alongside his obviously impressive athleticism, should be on people’s radar. Following former club mate Kuryu Matsuki’s transfer to Southampton, Tokyo FC has another young player that clubs in Europe should be looking at.

Header image copyright: IMAGO / AFLOSPORT