It’s incredible, isn’t it? After just 33 years of professionalism, the J.League can count on 60 clubs among the three pro-divisions, plus a few who eight got relegated or are playing in the Japan Football League, and who could still be into the mix. The goal of reaching the 100 clubs-mark doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all. Nonetheless, to come this way, the J.League needed to experiment and have some losses.
Not everything worked out super well: due to the “Lost Decade” – the economic bubble exploded in Japan during the 90s –, some investments had to be stopped and clubs folded, declaring bankruptcy. It didn’t happen often, but it’s a good reminder of how everything needs to be treated properly: look just also at what some clubs went through in the last decade (e.g. Sagan Tosu spent so much to have Fernando Torres that had serious problems in 2020, even no sponsors).
So you gotta be careful. And that’s why we came up with this new column, called “Cold Case”, in which we go through the clubs which didn’t make it and had to stop. We’re gonna use this space to revisit all the cases in which the clubs had to stop – these cases are becoming rarer and rarer, maybe avoiding them also through mergers (e.g. Kagoshima United FC are born from the merge of Volca Kagoshima and Kagoshima FC)… but they did happen, even in Japan.
To start such a column, we wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t start not just with the first case at all, but probably the most important one. Yes, because you know how right now Yokohama has three teams – Marinos, YFC, and YSCC. But there were just two in the 90s and Marinos didn’t have the “F” within their denomination, because that belonged to Yohohama Flügels, who were among the “Original 10” in the maiden season of 1993, and lasted just seven years.
The Story
The club was initially founded in 1964, with the name of “All Nippon Airways Soccer Club”, being the football club of the company itself. But then ANA opted to push for the entrance of the club in the upcoming J.League, starting from the regional Kanto Football League in the 1980s. To enter the J.League, they decided to adopt the name “Yohohama Flügels”, and the second word is the German equivalent of “wings”, connecting the squad to the ownership of a flying company.
With the push of ANA, Flügels initially were thought to be located in Machida, in the Tokyo area, but then they opted to Yokohama. And the club had as well some associated operations in Kyushu, where there were no professional club until 1996 (when Avispa Fukuoka joined the league), working in areas like Nagasaki and Kumamoto. And the results were good for a club starting from almost nowhere, with Marinos as rivals in the city.
In fact, Yohohama Flügels got a third place in 1996, won the Emperor’s Cup in 1993, and even did a continental double, winning both the Asian Cup Winners’ Cup (the previous version of the AFC Champions League), and the Asian Super Cup in 1995. And with the support of ANA, Flügels could also afford some incredible foreign players: the jersey was wore by César Sampaio, Zinho (a 1994 FIFA World Cup winner with Brazil), Paulo Futre, and Evair.
And the squad had several faces who were excellent interpreters of the J.League in the 90s: in the dugout, future Japan national team head coach Shu Kamo; on the pitch, national team members like Masayiko Maezono, Motohiro Yamaguchi, Atsuhiro Miura, plus youngsters with a solid future in front of them, like Seigo Narazaki and Yasuhito Endo. Isn’t it funny? Two of the three players all-time in the top flight for games played actually featured in a team which got disbanded.
The Fall
In fact, in October 1998, Sato Labs – one of the investing companies – pulled out of the financial backing, to save themselves from bankruptcy. At that point, ANA wasn’t going to finance this investment by themselves, and even Nissan Motors – who were instead funding Marinos in the other side of the city – had some problems. To avoid a total collapse of Japanese football in Yokohama, boards decided to merge the teams from 1999.
Unfortunately, fans didn’t take it well. At the first match of the decision was made public, a home game against Cerezo Osaka, fans had a joint sit-in calling for the decision to be reversed. Even the players joined, collecting 620,000 signatures. And when the final match at home came around, Flügels head coach, Gert Engels, made an appeal in Japanese to avoid the fall of the club. Nonetheless, ANA didn’t want to reverse the decision, despite public pressure.
With the merge being labelled as a “done deal”, ANA even promised to inform the fans, and then signed the merge two days before actually announcing it, further betraying the trust from the fans. At that point, the 1998 Emperor’s Cup was the final showcase for Flügels – with the players who had the chance of leaving the club and signing already with someone else. But Takashi Sakurai, one of the warm benchers, rallied the troops to show a unified spirit for the final leg of this adventure.
With this group, Flügels played the Emperor’s Cup in December. They won every game on their way, including the final on January 1st, 1999 against Shimizu S-Pulse. It was a fantastic last act, and the group was so united that many players didn’t decide yet what to do next. Sakurai himself told that celebrations after the match took place at the ANA Hotel, but it felt more as a farewell party, with some players in tears.
The Legacy
Somehow, Flügels built a legacy: they became the second team-ever in Japan to be disbanded, after Eidai Industries in 1976, when the parent company in the Yamaguchi Prefecture closed the squad because of rising costs. While Marinos absorbed the “F.” in their name, Flügels fans didn’t want to accept this, and fought back by creating a new team: Yokohama FC, who played several times in J1, and benefitted from a “Flügels Reconstruction Fund” of 25 million yen.
In 2001, Yokohama FC were already in J2 after just one season in the JFL. Colours from Flügels were adopted, and even if the club’s name doesn’t have a reference to Flügels, the operating company behind club does. Several goods from those times were donated to the JFA House, to be framed into a museum, in 2004. ANA tried to stay in the game as a backer, taking a 30% of the shares of Marinos, which were then sold back to Nissan Motors in 2002.
And even the players left an incredible mark. Many of them secured a contract in the following year, also thanks to the launch of the second division as a professional tier. Five players moved directly from Flügels to Marinos. Motohiro Yamaguchi, who came through the youth ranks of Marinos and took part into the 1998 FIFA World Cup with Japan, was critical of the merger; Narazaki left Flügels and refused to join Marinos, moving instead to Nagoya Grampus: “I don’t want to erase the memory of my former club”.
As an eerie joke, no players from Flügels moved directly to Yokohama FC. Yamaguchi had a partial revenge by bringing Yokohama FC to J1 in 2006 as a captain, while Yasuhito Endo retired in 2024 as the last active player who featured back then for Flügels. And the words from back-then J.League chairman, Saburo Kawabuchi, were clear: “When I was approached, the merger of the two teams was a done deal and could not be reversed.”
The approval of this move attracted a lot of criticism, but the J.League in the end avoided having another case like this one. Maybe the downfall of Yokohama Flügels had to happen to learn more about how to run a club. In this specific fundamental, J.League has been very strict with criteria, and tried to push expansion into local communities. Maybe Flügels had to fall down so others could properly walk into the future.
