September 28th, 2025 – it’s a busy day at the Toyama Stadium. The hosts are committed to a relegation fight, but it seems hard to pull off. They struggled all season long in their long-awaited return to J2, and they lived in the relegation zone the whole year. That day, Kataller Toyama lost to Tokushima Vortis at home. The guests were in a full play-off spot, winning 3-1 away in that match.
Back then, Toyama were nine points shy of salvation with just seven league games to go. It seemed an impossible task to pull off, and they had already played the card of changing their manager in June, which didn’t bring too many results: at that time, the PPG ratio of the new manager was actually worse than the previous one (0.64 against 0.94). Nothing that would guarantee another year in the second division, for sure.
Slightly more than a year later, Kataller Toyama defeated Vegalta Sendai at home, confirming their excellent record, and they’re almost at the top of the second division. They came out of that 2025 season swinging, avoiding a relegation that seemed guaranteed with an incredible final run of the season. And now they look like credible play-off contenders, if not a threat to a J1 climb.
How did that happen? It’s not usual to see that in Japanese football, although some examples could come to mind. But there are reasons behind this growth, which is unexpected in the history of Kataller Toyama, but it’s definitely understandable given everything that’s been done in the last two years. And who knows if we’re just at the beginning of this process…
The Club
If you’re new to the J.League-sphere or started following in the last decade, there’s no surprise or guilt if you don’t know anything about Kataller Toyama. Compared to other professional clubs, football in Toyama took more time to develop. There were already two teams in the region fighting to climb the Japanese football ladder: YKK AP SC and ALO’s Hokuriku (respectively owned by YKK and Hokuriku Electric Power Company).
In the mid-2000s, both clubs understood that joining forces would have been the best path to professional football. They merged into Kataller Toyama in 2008, with the investment of over 20 local companies and the involvement of the local prefecture as well. Their only JFL season was a cakewalk – third in the standings, and a J.League license was already granted in February 2008.
Kataller’s run in J2 lasted six years. Back then, relegations were not there yet. But in 2014, they came last in the table, and Zweigen Kanazawa took Toyama’s spot as the inaugural J3 champions. From there, Kataller stayed in J3 for a full decade, achieving promotion just in 2024 after an incredible play-off final against Matsumoto Yamaga (they were losing 2-0 before drawing in injury time, after losing promotion in 2023 due to goal difference).
The return to J2 was an incredible chance, but as we said in the opening of this piece, Kataller were 19th on Matchday 31, with seven games to go and nine points shy of salvation. An incredible run in the last seven matches (13 points) avoided the drop back to J3, including one of the craziest matches I’ve ever seen in J2, with Toyama defeating Blaublitz Akita 4-1 at home, the exact goal difference needed to push Roasso Kumamoto back to the third tier.
The Coach
In all of this, a shoutout must be given to Michiharu Otagiri, who’s to me an unsung hero of J3 (link). Raised in Toyama, he played for Kataller and then became a coach there in 2010, assuming the head coach position in 2022. He managed Kataller for 3.5 years, bringing them back to J2, and then solidifying his position as an excellent J3 manager after being sacked in Toyama (he had a good run with Nara Club, and he’s doing well with Renofa Yamaguchi).
To replace him in May 2025, Kataller chose Ryo Adachi. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry: Adachi basically disappeared after being the manager who brought Vissel Kobe back to J1 in 2013. He became an assistant manager in both Nagasaki and Yokohama, plus he was also back in Kobe for a few years as both a development coach and head of scouting.
Furthermore, Adachi coached in the minor leagues – in fact, he had already coached Kataller between 2018 and 2020, with Toyama reaching 4th place in his first full season in charge. To complete his resume, Adachi also had some JFL experience by coaching ReinMeer Aomori in 2021. He was in Yokohama when Toyama called him for another shot at Kataller. It seemed an impossible mission.
And instead, after that struggle, Adachi put everything together. And his impact was seen mostly throughout the 100-Year-Vision League and the J2-J3 tournament. Kataller were a rollercoaster, winning 10 of the 18 matches. Toyama reached the final of the J2-J3, facing Vegalta in Sendai. And despite being one man and one goal down, they equalised in injury time before losing on penalties. It was just an appetiser for this season.
The Players
How this season’s roster came to life is probably the most incredible part. Kataller kept most of the players, but they lost goalkeeper Tomoki Tagawa – who was on loan from Yokohama F. Marinos and moved to Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo -, plus young starlet Ayumu Kameda got severely injured at the beginning of the season. And yet… it didn’t matter; Kataller are still rocking J2. And that’s due to the three groups of players.
First one: the senators. They’re not playing that much, but they’re a good group with a lot of experience. Yuki Nakashima, Junya Imase, Yuki Saneto, Riki Matsuda, Nobuyuki Shiina, and Yuki Kagawa. But mostly, you have Keijiro Ogawa and Jung Woo-young, who are the senators who played the most minutes. Especially the return of the South Korean midfielder to the J.League gave Toyama a lot of leadership.
Then you have the second group: younger players with a lot of time spent in Toyama. It’s a smaller group, but very important: captain Tsubasa Yoshihira, winger Daichi Matsuoka, and now starting keeper Toshiki Hirao joined Kataller when the club was fighting in the muddy waters of J3, and they know how the club changed and progressed. And then you have the final and most surprising group of all: the new additions.
Sho Fuseya, Shunsuke Tanimoto, but mostly the whole offensive department – Yuto Kunitake, Manato Furukawa, Kim Tae-won, Kiyoshiro Tsuboi, Yoshiki Takahashi – are either uni players with no experience or recycled items that Toyama found a way to develop. And that’s not easy to do. For example: Tsuboi wasn’t seeing any pitch time in Tokushima, and now he’s scoring goals for Kataller in the same division.
But most of all, Toyama are a unit. After 15 rounds, they have the second-best attack of the tournament, but out of those 27 goals, no player scored more than five goals. The best scorer for Kataller – forward Manato Furukawa – is just ninth in the overall scoring charts. This means that Toyama have a system that goes beyond the players, and that’s what makes them special. Worth a watch until the very end of this incredible 2026-27 season.
