Bad Guy

If you think about the J.League and you have to identify the league with one manager, to whom do you think? Hajime Moriyasu for his successes and the role with the national team? Arsènè Wenger because of his stint with Nagoya Grampus? Or the many Brazilians who have floated into the J.League galaxy in these 30 years? You might have different names to think about, but a couple will emerge anyway from this 2023 season.

Last year, in our preseason coverage, we celebrated the figure of Mihailo Petrović, the Serbian head coach who went for the record of matches managed in J1 as a foreign figure. He holds that record, and he’s going to extend that, since Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo confirmed him at the helm of the club (despite you might want to start to look for an alternative). But if we’re talking about the most present manager in J1, you have to look to another name.

He’s one of the guys who goes in the opposite direction compared to the brand of football that J.League and Japanese football are playing. Not that we don’t need those guys: we talked about Hiroshi Jofuku when he was doing particularly well with Sanfrecce Hiroshima, and Massimo Ficcadenti surely made a career out of being rough and excellent on the defensive setup of his squads. But both them are not around: only one survived the transition.

To understand more about him, we would go with Billie Eilish lyrics from “Bad Guy”, probably her most famous song: “So he’s a tough guy / Like it really rough guy / Just can’t get enough guy”. Yes, because Kenta Hasegawa is still around, despite his reputation changed a lot in the last 5-6 years and Nagoya Grampus have been all but extraordinary to watch in the last 12 months. Nevertheless, he’s got 514 games in J1 and that’s a number going up from now on (third all-time, behind Nishino and Petrovic himself).

An iconic figure

Kenta Hasegawa isn’t your regular Joe. Born in 1965, he actually holds a pretty important role in the growth of the J.League. He’s from Shizuoka, where he tied to most of the first part of his career, as a player. Yes, he played for three years as a pro with Nissan Motors (now Yokohama F. Marinos), but he then spent the final portion of his pitch days with Shimizu S-Pulse (from 1992 to 1999). He featured for the national team, he won the hearts of S-Pulse, and even became a character in a manga series called “Chibi Maruko-chan”.

Therefore, the lovely Kenta wanted to become a manager. After being a commentator for NHK and the general manager for a couple of universities, Hasegawa then acquired the license to become a head coach. S-Pulse gave him a shot in 2005, and it worked: after a first rough season, Shimizu came fourth twice and once fifth, producing solid players. Two notable examples are Jungo Fujimoto and Shinji Okazaki, who actually emerged throughout Hasegawa’s stint at the club.

If you think about it, that’s actually the last long stint S-Pulse enjoyed as a relevant club, reaching the Emperor’s Cup final and producing interesting profiles on the Japanese football movement. When he left in 2010, Hasegawa seemed ready for another experience somewhere else, but it took actually more than two years to find him a new gig. And he took a complicate one, because in 2013 he became the head coach for Gamba Osaka, who just got relegated to J2 for the first time in their history.

The reputation tweak

Gamba were dreadful after they broke the common path with Akira Nishino, the head coach who brought the 2005 J1 title and the 2008 AFC Champions League. Squad was getting older, random, and their offensive trait wasn’t enough to support the whole balance of the team. Hasegawa started from scratch, inserting some fresh blood in the team and finding new protagonists: Patric, Hiroyuki Abe, Masaaki Higashiguchi, Kotaro Omori, the return of Takashi Usami from Germany.

It worked, even better than forecasted. Gamba won the promotion back to J1 immediately, but they made a miracle the next season. After being 16th in Matchday 12, they won the J1 title in 2014, matching it with the J.League Cup and the Emperor’s Cup. Like Antlers in 2008, they won the magical Treble. This gave Hasegawa a lot of credit in the club and among fans, but it was clear like his stint probably lasted one season too long, ending with a bad mood in 2017.

Luckily for Hasegawa, he found right away a new gig: FC Tokyo. And actually he did a solid job in the first two seasons, with echoes of a title-run in 2019 when Takefusa Kubo was around. Then something broke anyway, despite winning the 2020 J.League Cup: rough performances to watch, not too much balance between the players, the lack of progress. They all aligned in an 8-0 loss at Yokohama F. Marinos, which triggered his resignation of Hasegawa in November 2021.

Is it the same screenplay?

Despite this bitter end, Hasegawa didn’t find himself without a job. Actually, Nagoya Grampus took him right away to replace Massimo Ficcadenti, who – despite an excellent job – was axed by the board. The problem is that Hasegawa didn’t seem in the right place to start again: a pause to update his brand of football and take a break after eight seasons in a row could have worked. Instead, he threw himself into another adventure.

And not an easy one, because expectations were high at Grampus despite not having a striker – you won’t sell to us the concept of Noriyoshi Sakai being a no. 9 – and an aging team, relying on some players like Léo Silva. In fact, Grampus had a meh-season, reaching ninth in the table and being knocked-out pretty early in the national cups (quarter-finals in the J.League Cup and Round of 16 in the Emperor’s Cup). Best flashes came only due to Mateus’ magic arts on the pitch.

And now what? 2023 doesn’t look that different. Sure, the arrival on loan of Kasper Junker could help the no. 9 problem, and Mateus stayed despite some sirens from the Saudi Pro League, but the prospect doesn’t look that good. His point average at Nagoya is the worse of his career and he needs to deliver, although the group is aging and only a few profiles – like Ryoya Morishita, converted by him into a winger from the full-back original role – can really tweak his season.