December 6, Qatar World Cup 1/8 final, the Japanese team 2-4 defeat Croatia, the fourth consecutive stop eight, but their performance in the World Cup to the attention of the global football world. The Beijing Youth Daily emphasized in its post-match commentary that Japan's "100-year dream" is not a falsehood.
Since the professionalization reform in the 1990s, the Japanese men's football team has won the Asian Cup four times. This brilliant achievement is the result of long-term soccer planning, down-to-earth basic training, and the hard work of the leadership of the Football Association and the coaching team. The success of Japanese soccer is well deserved.
When it comes to the accumulation of Japanese soccer and the grassroots training of young players, we have to mention the Japan Soccer High School League, a 100-year tournament that has been held since 1917 and has lasted for 101 editions, with only five interruptions due to war. Since the professionalization of soccer, countless soccer stars such as Onoji, Nagaho Kato, Nakayama Masashi and Hasebe Naru have emerged. This long list is comparable to the all-star lineup of Japanese soccer.
After a century, the Japanese High School Football League has developed a 48-team final format. Of the 47 administrative districts in the country, Tokyo has two seats, and each of the remaining 46 prefectures has one seat. The final seats generated by the preliminaries are contested by local high school teams, with a total of more than 4,000 preliminaries, and no fewer than 100,000 high school soccer players participating each year. Why do so many Japanese internationals and even Asian stars come from this league? The answer is simple, the huge mass base, the National High School Soccer League's talent education function is powerful, quality comes from quantity, this is the truth of the sports world. 2016 final, the number of spectators as high as 54,000, far more than many national professional soccer tournaments.
The high school league has constructed a perfect talent development system, laying a solid foundation for the emergence of Japanese soccer talents. The best players can sign for professional teams, or even directly enter the reserve teams of European clubs, or study and train in universities to pursue their soccer dreams. In short, the Japanese high school soccer league is like a "blood bank" of soccer talents, constantly nurturing newcomers and outputting a stable output, which is the only way for young people to grow, and also the expectation of countless parents and fans. Combined with Japan's 7 World Cups and 4 Round of 16 appearances, and its rivalry with the world's strongest teams, Japan's "100-year plan" and "dream statement" have proved to be more than just empty talk. With a strong foundation of youth soccer, the vitality of Japanese soccer is fully guaranteed.
