The first summer transfer window in history for the J.League – or at least one that’s the main one and not anymore a reparatory one – has produced a lot. I’d say more in still in place, with players tipped to leave Japan, and some to come back. The usual foreigners have been signed, and there’s been movement as well between the teams, but… there’s one club which I think is doing a very good job in keeping it all together.
The club changed coach last Winter, after a four-year stint by the previous one, in which three trophies have been won. Their 100-Year Vision League performances were a bit of a rollercoaster, but you could clearly see the potential is there. They just needed to be way more efficient in front of goal, and they did a couple of changes which could exactly help in that sense. I’m talking of Sanfrecce Hiroshima, coached by Bartosch Gaul (we interviewed him just a few months ago).
There’s no doubt that Kashima Antlers will be the favourite to defend their J1 title, but if there’s an opponent who might be capable of throw a run for their money, well… it’s Sanfrecce Hiroshima. They have an expert roster (average age is 27.2 years), they had a nice stretch of J1 seasons (from 2022: third, third, second, fourth), and they had a shot at winning the 100-Year Vision League before coming fourth in a very balanced West division.
There are several reasons why Sanfrecce Hiroshima must give it a shot, and we’ll go through them in this article. But if I might already leave you with some takeaways, it’s that I’ve rarely witnessed a group so talented not winning a title. It’s also a group that’s been together for a long time – the average time at the club within the roster is 999 days (three seasons). There’s everything to make the final leap and bring back the crown to Hiroshima.
Delays and history-makers
I mean, Sanfrecce Hiroshima struggled a lot for the first 15 years of pro-football in Japan. They came close to winning something, but they got relegated twice, and the 2008 Japanese Super Cup was the first silverware they ever put in their cabinet. From there, through the work of head coach Mihailo Petrović, they build a nice group, capable of coming back to the top-flight and even reaching the AFC Champions League.
But it was under a young and then relatively unknown Hajime Moriyasu that the club actually made the leap. Sanfrecce Hiroshima won three J1 titles in the space of four years, they added three Japanese Super Cups, and they even reached the third place at the 2015 FIFA Club World Cup. They were a defining club of that era of Japanese football – two J.League MVPs, two J1 top-scorers, six players in the Top XI of those seasons, and Moriyasu was “Manager of the Year” for three times.
When Moriyasu was sacked mid-seaons after a dreadful campaign in 2017, there were some doubts if the club would have touched again those heights. We got a pretty quick response: in 2018, under new head coach (and master of the dark defensive arts) Hiroshi Jofuku, Sanfrecce Hiroshima led the table from Matchday 6 to Round 27, before tumbling down and finishing as runners-up just in the last game (after the first half of that match in Sapporo, they were fourth). Jofuku stayed for 3.5 years, but Sanfrecce were not able to repeat those results and slipped towards mid-table anonymity.
Jofuku was then sacked and Kentaro Sawada brought the ship home for the 2021 season. Nonetheless, the club was building something. They had launched new players like goalkeeper Keisuke Osako, wing-back Shunki Higashi, centre-back Hayato Araki. Furthermore, a couple of senators were still around, like Toshihiro Aoyama, Sho Sasaki, and Tsukasa Shiotani. They built a new stadium, which was then opened in 2024. But in Winter 2021-22, that’s where the club took a renewed step to come back to the top.
Incomplete
When Sanfrecce Hiroshima announced Michael Skibbe as the new head coach, I was very surprised. For two reasons: a) in the previous decade, the only foreign manager they had lasted just six months, when Jan Jönsson coached the club to finish the 2017 season; b) the career of Skibbe took a strange trajectory. At 33 years old, he was coaching Borussia Dortmund; at 35 he was the de facto head coach of the German national team. Two decades later, he had several forgettable experiences around the world.
In fact, I was expecting Sanfrecce Hiroshima to struggle. Instead, the club blossomed. They never finished outside the Top 4 in four years under Skibbe; many young guns were nurtured under his 3-4-2-1, like Shuto Nakano, Yuki Ohashi, Makoto Mitsuta, Sota Nakamura, Satoshi Tanaka. Some of them either finished in Europe or featured for the Japan national team; to top that, Skibbe won three trophies – two J. League Cups and a Japanese Super Cup.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t a stint without any regrets. First of all, there was the fiasco of the AFC Champions League Two, where Sanfrecce got knocked out because of administrative mistakes. At the end of the road, the silverware was definitely there, but given how often Sanfrecce Hiroshima found themselves finishing at the top of the table, you wonder if they could have won a J1 title in these four years.
Sure, Vissel Kobe and Yokohama F. Marinos were solid teams, but the Purple Archers lost more than one chance to do so. 2024 in particular feels like a lost chance, since Sanfrecce were top of the table with four games to go, and then ended up racking up just three points from the last five games, including four losses (half of the ones in that entire championship). That year, Skibbe and his boys could have won the whole thing.
Now or never?
2026-27 will present a unique chance. Vissel Kobe have still roster depth, but their strategy has been debilitated by an aging roster. Many teams will take part into a renewed version of the AFC Champions League Elite, plus Machida Zelvia will have the AFC Champions League Two. And last but not least, some clubs have been gutted by the loss of either some players or the head coach (ask the two clubs from Osaka how fun must have been to schedule this season…).
The real concurrent team for the title is Kashima Antlers, although their roster hasn’t exactly expanded and they didn’t have the ACLE last year, a competition to which they’ve come back for the first time since 2020. And there’s no doubt that both the club and head coach Toru Oniki will want to do well on the continental stage (just because Oniki, even in his Frontale dynasty, always underdelivered in the ACL).
Meanwhile, Sanfrecce Hiroshima lost indeed Sota Nakamura to Le Havre, but the no. 39 played less minutes under Gaul (starting just seven times in league games), and the club added a few more elements to the roster. Takuma Asano and Sébastien Haller have to be vetted regarding their condition and fit with the team, but there’s no doubt they might be a plus upfront. And I might add, a significant improvement compared to Kosuke Kinoshita and Ryo Germain (who left to join both Shimizu S-Pulse). Those two, added to Nakamura, Kato, and Akito Suzuki? There’s some potential in there.
As much as Gaul told us in a previous interview that the project in Hiroshima is about the development of players and following a certain style of play, even an untrained eye would understand that Sanfrecce have a major chance of at least trying a run for the title. And lift the trophy again after a decade – which would be a massive joy for a club who’s done a lot of heavy lifting outside the pitch. Now it’s time to do the same in J1.
