Villain for Life

Every good story needs a hurdle. Every hero needs an antagonist. And there wouldn’t be no enemy without a cause to champion. In football, all of this is more than respected – by the book, we would even say. There are good guys and bad guys – Roy Keane, Marco Materazzi, Luis Suarez, Diego Costa, and others. We had a lot of them in football, but not so many in the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Contrary to European and mostly South American football, J.League lacked those villains, mainly for two reasons: a) Japanese society’s will to live in harmony, and provide a collective environment; b) the missing experience in the world of football, where “shithousery” is one of the many tools you can use to win. But in the end, some controversial players emerged.

One of the first was surely Marcus Tulio Tanaka – a national hero because of his value on the pitch (both offensively and defensively), but also because his attitude on the pitch was to win above all. In this imaginary dynasty, we could say Yuma Suzuki is the current holder of this malignant art – we already talked about him a few years ago, and he surely didn’t lose his touch over time.

Between the two, though, there was a time where another striker was the master in chief of this art – Yohei Toyoda was the no. 11 from Sagan Tosu and retained that number and role for a decade. Funnily enough, just like Tulio and Suzuki, his grit-and-grind profile was also matched by a wonderful career while being a villain.

No Football, No Life

Born in Komatsu (Kanazawa Prefecture) in 1985, Toyoda didn’t start as a kid with the will of becoming a professional player. Actually, until junior high school, that wasn’t his plan – until he enrolled into Hoshino High School, where also a certain Keisuke Honda was a member. Toyoda joined the Nagoya Grampus Eight in J1, skipping university alongside Honda, and meeting also Eiji Kawashima.

Toyoda stayed three years in Nagoya, but then opted to leave for Montedio Yamagata, who were in J2. And that’s where the life of Toyoda could have ended – in July ’07, in a Satellite League match against Yokohama F. Marinos, the striker was hit in the stomach and suffered a small intestinal rupture. Toyoda had to leave the pitch, and he felt a terrible pain in his abdomen, but couldn’t go to the bathroom.

The pain was so strong that Toyoda needed two shots of morphine just to survive the pain, and reach the hospital for an emergency op. If the rupture had happened five centimetres misaligned, Toyoda could have risked his life. Toyoda remembers dreaming of football while being in the hospital bed, and couldn’t imagine his life without football. The aim? The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games with Japan.

Toyoda came back onto the pitch, and played 18 months with Yamagata – it was a risky choice for the striker, but it paid back: 11 goals in just 23 matches of 2008 were enough to take part into the Olympics and gain a transfer towards Kyoto Sanga. Unfortunately, things in Kyoto didn’t work out – Toyoda scored just once in a side that got 12th in the end, and he needed a new start. He didn’t know that would have come in Kyushu. 

Tosu-esque

When Toyoda moved to Sagan Tosu – a perennial J2 team back in 2010 – at 25 years old and after six seasons as a pro, everything seemed to point towards a mediocre career. Instead, Toyoda was the perfect centre-piece of a team of nobodys – Kim Min-woo, Kei Ikeda, Naoyuki Fujita, Ryota Hayasaka, Kim Myong-hwi – and brought them to J1 for the first time. In those two seasons on loan to Tosu, Toyoda scored 36 goals.

Once promoted, Gamba Osaka and Shimizu S-Pulse (who targeted also Mike Havenaar, but he moved overseas) would have gladly signed the striker from Kyoto Sanga. Instead, Toyoda opted to join Sagan permanently and face together the maiden J1 season. And the no. 11 delivered big time: 19 goals in his return to the main stage, with the spot in the “Best XI” and the offer from the Chinese giants of Shanghai Shenhua.

Toyoda though it was a joke – playing with Didier Drogba, earning money never seen in his life, and taking the wave off the rising CSL. Instead, the striker refused the offer (worried that accepting wouldn’t have cut him out from the national team) and stayed in Tosu, where he’s written every significant page of the club’s recent history. We find pretty fitting that the club faced relegation from J1 just a few years after losing his magical talisman.

Toyoda scored 145 goals with Sagan (+96 on the runners-up…) in 343 games in all competitions, which means one goal every 182 minutes. For seven seasons in a row, he was the top-scorer of the club. He scored 99 goals in J1 – bummer he won’t reach 100 – and he scored a hat-trick for Sagan in at least three competitions (one in the Emperor’s Cup in 2010, one in J2 in 2011, and twice in the 2013 J1 League).

The Villain’s Arc

Why is though Yohei Toyoda a villain? Well, first of all because of some episodes. In 2007, while playing for Montedio Yamagata and facing Thespakusatsu Gunma, he kicked Daisuke Fujii, a player from Thespa. Toyoda didn’t get ejected, but he didn’t play for five games, and that reputation stayed. Especially when the striker and Sagan Tosu joined J1.

Take the episode between him and Shunsuke Nakamura. Back then, in March 2012, Marinos are hosted by Sagan Tosu – to buy some time after going in front, Toyoda lingered a bit longer on the ball with Nakamura wanting to resume the game. Furious for the loss of time, Nakamura – a pretty chilled guy in his entire career – hit Toyoda in the abdomen with his knee. That deserved a punishment, but Toyoda acknowledged his act was deliberate.

In the end, Toyoda represented the grit and grind of J.League football – strong, powerful, so much to earn the nickname “Toyogba” (morphed on the way of playing, which resembled a lot the one from Didier Drogba). And Toyoda didn’t like formalism – Keisuke Honda, one year younger than him, always remembers how he called Toyoda “Toyo” and he was called back “Honda-kun”.

Furthermore, the iconic mouthguard – the one Toyoda wore in Tosu for the entirety of his stay, and he was using it already in high school. It became a trademark of his persona – to the point that the striker actually had a custom-made by a local dental clinic. And when he played for the national team, he turned that from pink into red to match the national team’s colours. 

Long Live Yohei

With time, the villain turned into a folk. He reached the national team, being called-up for the 2015 AFC Asian Cup, where he’ll be probably be recalled for the incredible loss in the quarter-finals against the UAE. He had to briefly leave Tosu in 2018, when he got loaned to Ulsan Hyundai – and then came back to witness the Fernando Torres’ era, throughout while Toyoda scored almost the same goals of the Spanish striker.

His production struggled, to the point he finished both 2018 and 2020 as seasons without any goal in J1. Once Kim Myung-hwi – his former teammate turned head coach at Sagan Tosu – decided to bench him for good, Toyoda left Sagan in 2021 to go back to J2, this time to Tochigi. It was a brief experience just to get pitch time, which lasted just six months and three goals in 16 games.

Then it was time to come back home – Toyoda signed for Zweigen Kanazawa for the 2022 season, staying there through thick and thin for three years. He scored 11 goals in total, all coming in ’22 and ’23 while Kanazawa were still in J2. Then the relegation to J3, he came on in two of the first three games of the season – and then just disappeared from the line-up. Ten days ago, he announced to retire for good.

It wasn’t always certain what he wanted to do, like Toyoda confirmed a few days ago: “As you get older, you feel you’re losing a few things. I’m finally injury-free, and I can pass my knowledge to younger players. I think I’ve done enough, and it’s okay to retire now”. In the end, Sagan Tosu asked him to join the staff and Toyoda felt there was something to give back: “I wouldn’t be the person I am today without Tosu”.