Captain Goal-tastic

Although the 2025 season will be mostly remembered for the incredible run of the two directly-promoted teams, there’s no doubt that Tegevajaro Miyazaki are onto something. Their season has been bright, they clinched a play-offs spot for the first time in club’s history, and they boosted the value of many players (Mahiro Ano and Genki Egawa, just to make a couple of names, come to mind).

After almost winning it all in their rookie campaign in 2021, the club had another decent season in 2022 (coming ninth), before dropping off a cliff in terms of performance. They barely avoided danger in 2023 – when they finished 19th – and they were not particularly impressive in 2024 (closing 15th). Nonetheless, they stuck together with the pieces they had. Miyazaki isn’t exactly a major Prefecture, even in the island of Kyushu – where Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki all had a J1 club in the last decade.

Being part of the pro-game seemed enough, but now they’re gonna play their first post-season matches to reach what would be a surprising promotion to J2. And if that happens, the credit will rely on the staff and the players, but captain Keigo Hashimoto definitely stepped up his game to make this happen. And that’s probably why our readers picked him as the MVP of the J3 League season in our “Regista Awards”.

From Osaka to Kyushu

Born in the Osaka Prefecture in 1998, Hashimoto spent there mostly of his life. He attended high school there; he then enrolled on the Osaka University of Commerce – scoring 48 goals in four years in the second division of the Kansai Soccer League with the university club. When it was time to go pro, he chose to leave Osaka – since Cerezo and Gamba were definitely out of reach, while FC Osaka were not yet a pro-club.

Hashimoto moved to Miyazaki, where he joined Tegevajaro – a club ready to play their first pro-season after the promotion from the Japan Football League. Hashimoto wasn’t a starter, but he contributed nonetheless to the incredible rookie campaign of the small club, which almost won the whole J3 at the first try. Six goals in 28 games – including a run of four consecutive games in the Summer with a goal – seemed a promising start for a rookie coming to his first experience in the J.League, mostly coming off the bench.

Hashimoto kept that kind of production also in 2022, scoring this time five goals in 26 matches. Unfortunately for him, Tegevajaro Miyazaki entered a terrible run of form in 2023, which impacted Hashimoto’s production as well – the no. 11 scored just once in the whole season, including a terrible injury that kept him sidelined for four months. 

Destiny awaits

Luckily for him, the real change which triggered a career improvement came in the dugout. After that terrible 2023 season, Tegevajaro Miyazaki chose Yuji Okuma as the new head coach in December of that year. Okuma, a man with experience also at a higher level (he coached Cerezo Osaka, both the first team and mostly the U-23 side in J3), helped prompting a positive 2024 – not so much for the club, which lingered in the lower side of the table, but for Hashimoto.

While Tegevajaro stayed in 15th place (improving their form throughout the season), Hashimoto finally reached double digits of goals in one season, hitting the net 12 times in 35 games (plus nine assists!). To recap it, in 2024 he scored the same goals he bagged in the first three pro-seasons with Miyazaki, becoming as well a totem for Miyazaki’s fortune in the third tier. And that was just the beginning.

In fact, during the pre-season training camp, the head coach was very happy to have kept some of the most interesting players. And Hashimoto talked a big game about Tegevajaro’s ambitions: “I’m older, so I want to be a good example for everyone. My biggest wish is to get Miyazaki promoted to J2, so I hope we can achieve that”. A 1-0 home defeat against Nagano Parceiro in the opening match wasn’t a good start, but it was just a minor hick-up.

A Dream to Reach

The fact that Hashimoto worked as a centre-striker under Okuma is in the data: 39 goals in 72 matches under him. Furthermore, the board did something clever by bringing in mid-season Hayate Take, J3 striker specialist and a good partner for Hashimoto, who is an atypical no. 9 and left Take most of the heavy challenges. In the end, it was a return for Take – who was on loan to Miyazaki already last year (eight goals in 14 matches!), before joining Kataller Toyama in the second division.

It worked – we’re already at 25 goals in 33 games, while Take as well had a prolific season (five goals and four assists in 11 matches are a lot). There is also some data which testifies to the progress of Hashimoto: for the first time in his career, he scored braces (five) and hat-tricks (two). He’s the fourth player in the entire history of the J3 League to score at least 20 goals in one season. And he’s gonna be the top-scorer with a mighty margin.

For now he’s +13 on the runner-up in that table. And to think he didn’t score one single goal until Matchday 9. Now the play-offs, with a chance of reaching J2 – which to us looks something Hashimoto would deserve anyways, with or without Tegevajaro. But he’s also the captain there, and he spent his whole young career in Miyazaki. Is he gonna be the face of a miracle or will he climb towards J2 by himself next Winter? We’ll have to wait and see…