Hello, Nihon – Belgium 

“The Athletic”, “Total Football Analysis”, and many more: Japan is on the map. It’s not just the performance at 2022 FIFA World Cup – where the Samurai Blue upset both Germany and Spain to win the group -, but it’s also around the professional attitude of players, the contained costs, and the easier accessibility to scouting tools towards the country.

This spurred a literal revolution in the last windows of the transfer market. On average, 10 players from the J.League are leaving the country to try the European leap, and also this last Winter transfer window surpassed the average of five (with Hiroki Sekine joining Stade Reims, Isa Sakamoto, Hiiro Komori and Ayumu Ohata going to Belgium, Ryo Hatsuse close to the Championship, etc.). 

So the question is not anymore why European clubs are picking Japanese clubs, but rather from where. And a few hubs consolidated themselves in the last years – and that’s what we’re gonna investigate in the next months, also looking at the Summer. We’re gonna start from a place that clearly took a gamble towards the J.League – and it’s paying back, also for some cultural reasons.

Belgium and the Jupiler Pro League welcomed an incredible amount of players from the J.League and they’re a well-respected league, plus they have a really strong national team. We sat down with Bart Tamsyn, Area Manager for Transfermarkt in Belgium and the Netherlands, to understand a few things about this special relationship. Please enjoy the read!

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1. Let’s start from afar – Belgium and Japan faced in different World Cups, and they seem worlds apart in 2002. They seemed way closer in 2018, when they squared off for that famous Round of 16 matches. Do you see any similarities in the way of interpreting football?

Belgium actually first came into contact with Japanese football and the J.League when Lorenzo Staelens moved to Oita Trinita, then a club in the second division, in the summer of 2001. With 70 games for the Belgian national team, Staelens is still in the Top 25 of players with the most international games for Belgium so some attention was paid to his adventure at the time.

Furthermore, we did indeed have Thomas Vermaelen and Jordy Croux, but with different results. Despite he reached 100 games in the J1 League by now, Croux is fairly unknown in Belgium. He got the most attention when Iniesta retired because he lived in the same building as him… but even then, there was a Belgian journalist who described him as a goalkeeper, just to show that Croux’s career in Japan is not really followed.

2. Jupiler Pro League saw 15 Japanese players taking part into this season, it’s 6% of the entire foreign force in rosters. It’s a steep rise – which factors have pushed that?

Belgian clubs could not enter competitions where the big European clubs were also active in their search for talent, such as the Brazilian or Argentinian ones. Still, it took a fairly long time before the Japanese league came on the radar. 

One reason given was that, despite the mentality and discipline possessed by Japanese players, there was a lack in terms of technique and tactics. The latter was also the case with players from South America and Africa, but they did possess technique and thus did not need to be retrained as much so that added value could be developed more quickly.

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3. Until now, a lot of Japanese players featured in the Belgian Pro League, but until 2017 only four of them ever saw pitch time. If you compared this current epoque with the times when Takayuki Suzuki or even Eiji Kawashima and Kensuke Nagai took the stage in Belgium, what’s changed? Both from the Japanese side and the Belgian side.

If Japanese players got into Belgium between 2000 and 2020, it was actually not because of club scouting, but through the network of agents. For example, I was part of the agency that offered Eiji Kawashima at Lierse. I think he was the first Japanese goalkeeper to join an European club at that time (author’s note – Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi had stints in Denmark and England, but nevertheless it was a big move after the World Cup). 

After 2020 and especially through the increased availability of footage, Belgium’s top clubs started scouting more in Japan to discover the young talents. But despite this, it also remains a question of being able to reach the right people. Keisuke Goto might as well have been at Club Brugge instead of Anderlecht, as he was also offered there. 

In addition, the change from the J.League to the Jupiler Pro League may be a serious adjustment for the Japanese players themselves, and it’s no easy matter for Belgian clubs to bring players from Japan. Shion Homma, who will only be remembered because his goal that caused Union SG to lose the title in 2023, was barely allowed to play a handful of minutes with the first team (author’s note – we’re still crying over it).

Nonetheless, between his arrival in Belgium and his effective signing, there was a trial of five days via testing in all areas because we know so little about Japanese players. So it is a serious investment to bring a young Japanese talent to Belgium when none have managed to break through at the moment.

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4. At the top of your head – best and worst deal for a Belgian club around a Japanese players. And if you look at 2024-25 Japanese contingent in the championship, who’s the player that’s impressing you the most?

Of course, the arrival of Japanese players in Belgium has been boosted by the acquisition of STVV by Japan’s DMM. They obviously did have the knowledge of the Japanese league and the connections. When several other clubs noticed that STVV did not succumb to that Japanese influence, they also expressed their interest while Japanese agents started looking beyond just STVV in Belgium. Therefore, more and more Japanese players came to Belgium.

Yet it is still no easy task for Japanese players to break through from Belgium. At the moment, I think we can only talk about Takehiro Tomiyasu as a player who has reached the European top via Belgium. I therefore rather think that the level of youth training in Japan needs to be raised to see Belgium as a pathway for them towards the European top, while Belgium is now rather a top on its own for many.

5. Last but not least, this could work the other way around. Jordy Croux has been the only Belgian player in the J.League last year, and only two ever featured in J1 (the other being Thomas Vermaelen). Do you see a couple of names that could do some good in the J.League from the Belgian football movement?

Honestly, I don’t think we won’t see a lot of Belgian players evading to Japan in the near future either. Japan is not immediately seen by young players as a step forward in their career while for more experienced players, the step is not so obvious because of their family situation.

Japanese, however, are liked in Belgium because of their mentality, respect and physical preparedness. Whereas Belgian teams could still compete with the European top in the 70s-80s, this has not been the case since the 90s. Meanwhile, the Jupiler Pro League is known as a developing league, a competition where players are recruited young, polished and then sold for massive sums to a club from the Top 5 European leagues.

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This is just the first episode of a column that we hope that will give the best to the curious followers around the J.League. We can only thank Bart for his availability – he’s a solid career in scouting with several clubs, and you can find him here on Twitter.

Transfermarkt is surely one hub to refer to, and we hope to have other protagonists of their team involved. Meanwhile, a new column has started, and you know how much we like them (check here all categories). See you soon!