Most football fans in the West have, at best, only a slight familiarity with the J1 League, the top flight of Japanese football, but you’d be very hard-pressed to find punters who know anything about the J2 League, which sits below it. Even fewer would know the J3 League exists, but then we here at Club 25 do enjoy bringing smaller teams and their shirts to the limelight in a world dominated by the giants of European football. So, grab yourself a cup of green tea and settle in as we take a closer look at a shirt worn in the 2018 J2 League, by current J3 League team FC Gifu;

Now isn’t that a brilliant look? A hooped design with a twist, this shirt incorporates dark green bands offset by bands made up of four lighter shades of green, mixed up in a random pattern of tiny square blocks – making for a visual effect you’d expect to see in a 8-bit video game rather than a football kit!

If that isn’t evidence that it’s worth getting into Japanese football and keeping your eye on the J2 and J3 leagues, if only for the shirts, then we don’t know what is. In this article, we’ll be covering the club, its home city (called Gifu, of course) and prefecture (the administrative/cultural region it belongs to, coincidentally also called Gifu), the sponsors found on the shirt and its overall design, as well as FC Gifu’s results in the 2018 season, but before we get into the nitty-gritty, do consider having a look at the two Japanese shirts we’ve previously covered;

Your mileage as to how Japanese these are may vary, but we’ve also covered Albirex Niigata Singapore shirts;

Made by New Balance, all sponsor outings as well as the crest on this shirt are stickered on rather than sublimated or embroidered – something to keep in mind when washing it as these elements can be easily damaged if not taken care of properly.

The chest is dominated by a large outing of main sponsor NGK Spark Plugs, who use it to ‘plug’ (hah!) their two main brands of NGK and NTK. The company calls this logo the ‘twinsmark’, with the text below NGK saying ‘spark plugs’, the text below NTK saying ‘ technical ceramics’, and the legend at the bottom saying the company’s full name. At least, we think it does – we don’t speak a lick of Japanese outside of select words and phrases picked up from the 龍が如く series of video games. A staunch supporter of the club and present on the shirts since 2015, NGK (Nippon Gaishi Kaisha, or Japan Insulator Company) are based in Nagoya in the Aichi prefecture to the south of Gifu prefecture.

Leaving aside the sponsors for now, we want to provide a close-up look of the hoops on this shirt to really drive home the intricacy of the lighter green ones – making use of no less than four different shades to create what a creative mind could call ‘digital camouflage’. There is a lot of subtlety involved too, owing to the four greens used being only slightly lighter or darker compared to one another.

Interesting to consider is the fact that the positioning of the blocks is the same for each hoop, although slightly offset either to the left or the right. As seen in our picture above, the lower hoop has the same configuration as the ones above it, but has everything sit a couple of blocks further to the right. To test this for yourself, find a memorable selection of squares in one hoop, then try to find it in the other. We’re not sure whether the offset in blocks is a feature on all shirts, or specific to ours as we have a Japanese size XL (which we really regret, as it’s too big to wear, but then you can’t always choose your size when you find a rare shirt like this for a good price online).

If you like your club crests to have a lot of symbolism, you’ll really enjoy FC Gifu’s, as the old fashioned football in the centre is the only element not to be specifically tied to either the city or the prefecture.

The flowers are Astragalus sinicus, also known as renge in Gifu, a species of milkvetch that serves as the prefectural flower; this is your first hint that the club considers itself a representative of the prefecture as a whole rather than of just the city – after all, FC Gifu remains the only J.League team in Gifu prefecture, and incredibly enough only the second from the Tōkai region behind Nagoya Grampus (Gifu is the fourth if you’re of the belief that Shizuoka Prefecture is part of Tōkai, in which case Shimizu S-Pulse and Júbilo Iwata are also representatives).

Three lines of colour, green, blue, and red are present and stand for harmony, intelligence, and passion respectively, while their number (three, like the flowers) represents the Kiso, Ibi, and Nagara rivers that flow through the Nōbi Plain in the southwest part of Gifu prefecture. The top of the crest, meanwhile, evokes the Hida Mountains which run through the North of the prefecture, and, finally, the scroll upon which the club’s name sits features the wing-like fukigaeshi of old Samurai helmets with these being based specifically on those of the Tokugawa shogunate, whose members ruled Japan for two centuries and hailed from the old Mikawa province (which is the Eastern half of modern day Aichi prefecture).

You have to admire how our articles seem to devolve into history classes every other week.

As for a bit of modern history, the 2018 season is significant in Japanese football for being the first campaign that featured so-called collarbone sponsors (wonder why they’re called that….). Ratified in December 2017 by the governing bodies of the J.League, most teams had to scramble to find sponsors in time for kick-off of the season in late February 2018, with Gifu seemingly having no trouble attracting interested parties to their shirt.

On the right chest (so, on the left in this picture) we have the logo of Gifu Shatai, or Gifu Auto Body if you prefer. Manufacturers of the Toyota Hiace model and ambulances carrying the same brand, these guys not only sponsor FC Gifu’s shirts but are also heavily invested in the club’s community programs.

On the left chest (in the right of this picture; are you confused yet?) we find the name of the Meitetsu Kyosho company and their slogan ‘We can work together to fulfill your needs’. A helpful lot, it seems like. Like NGK, they are headquartered in Nagoya, but unlike NGK they don’t manufacture sparkplugs but rather manage and run a bazillion parking lot enterprises, notably around train stations on the Nagoya, Seto, and Tokoname lines, amongst others. Japan loves its railways (and we do hear they are dang good), so its a nice to surprise to find a related sponsor on this shirt.

A simple collar sits atop the shirt, with a placket and a single button running down between both collar sponsors. The New Balance tags are still attached, and list the RRP of this shirt as ¥13,797. This, then, is probably the reason why Japanese football shirts tend to be rather rare; they’re bloody expensive! That near fourteen thousand Yen figure converts to 96 GBP flat at the time of writing! 112,40 EUR! 125,46 USD! If every shirt cost this much and we had to pay full price for all of them, this site would have been bankrupt after its first month of existence!

New Balance are a quality brand and usually deliver great shirts in both design and make (they should have sublimated the sponsors on this top though), but that pricetag boggles the mind (the most we ever paid for a single shirt was 90 GBP for this Poppy kit). Let’s all hope for Japan’s sake that end-of-season-sales feature really, really deep discounts over there.

The supplier’s NB logo is done up in a nicely textured rubber as can be seen above, with diagonal lines making for an interesting experience when running a finger over it. This Gifu shirt is, incredibly enough, both the first New Balance shirt in our collection and on the site – this American company has a visible presence in football thanks to big customers like Liverpool (but not for long any more, sadly), Celtic, and FC Porto, but because they barely ever take on smaller contracts, we’ve never felt the need to add one of their products to our catalogue.

First appearing in Europe as suppliers of Wigan Athletic in the 80’s but disappearing in the late 90’s, New Balance returned to football under its Warrior Sports brand in 2012/2013 by supplying Liverpool. Either New Balance was unhappy with the resulting limited exposure for their main brand or worried about the backlash Warrior’s designs received, as the NB logomark supplanted Warrior’s stylized W logo on all their customer teams by the time the 2015/2016 season started. This included Sagan Tosu, the J1 team that became Warrior’s first customer in Asia in 2013 and who are still outfitted by New Balance to this day. FC Gifu was signed ahead of the 2017 season, a pinstriped effort in dark green becoming the Americans’ first design for the club.

On the right sleeve, we have a rubbery, flexible league patch with a bit of texturing of its own. Featuring the iconic J.League ‘J’ that has gone unchanged for decades now, the patch features the Japanese football pyramid’s name in roman letters as well as the name of title sponsors Meiji Yasuda Life (明治安田生命) in Japanese; this is one of the largest insurance companies in Japan and was the inaugural title sponsor of J3 in 2015 before taking on title sponsorship for J1 and J2 a year later. The deal between Meiji Yasuda and the J.League will run until at least the end of the 2023 season.

The sponsor below the league patch, written entirely in Japanese to make our lives harder, says ‘Seiryu no Kuni Gifu’ or ‘Country of pure water Gifu’. This seems to be some kind of municipal or prefectural campaign against water pollution, which makes sense given the gradient present in the blue lettering here. Very wholesome.

Now the left sleeve features a very familiar face to anyone who enjoys both football and Japanese manga; Tsubasa Ōzora, known more famously as Captain Tsubasa – the eponymous protagonist of the iconic and long-running Captain Tsubasa series. Enjoying boundless popularity in both Japan and the West (through its anime adaptations), Ōzora’s appearance on this shirt will make it a bit more of a collector’s item than it already is.

Nonetheless, this sponsor deceives us twice; for one, it does not actually promote the manga or anime series Captain Tsubasa has starred in. Rather, this is an ad for the Captain Tsubasa Stadium. For two, ‘stadium’ is used very loosely here, as it is, in all actuality, a private-hire football facility with one full outdoor pitch, two mini outdoor pitches, and one futsal pitch in the town of Tarui, west of Gifu city.

Further investigative work indicates that Captain Tsubasa Stadium is a chain of for-hire pitches, because other branches seem to exist in Osaka, Yokohama, and Tokyo – this makes the facility in Tarui especially bizarre as it is but a speck of dust on the map compared to the gargantuan cities the other pitches are located in. Still, it’s a very nifty sponsor all the same, because it’s still the one and only Captain Tsubasa!

Flip the shirt over and you’ll find the hoops continue on the back, along with the dark green mesh side-inserts we previously saw on the front. No name or number present, but we do have two sponsors to give this side a bit of character. The lower one, Act Holdings, is a self-professed ‘ecotech’ company that deals in solar panels.

Seino (Transportation), with its dramatic kangaroo logo, is a more sentimental sponsor than you might expect, being closely tied to the history of football in Gifu and the indirect reason for the creation of FC Gifu.

In the early years of football in Japan (the 70’s and 80’s), works teams sponsored by large corporations dominated the leagues up and down the country. Every team of note had at least one large corporate backer behind it, such as Yokohama being the property of Nissan. Some clubs, like Shimizu S-Pulse, have slightly more genteel origins, but the majority of top clubs in the country today still have strong ties to the companies that founded them (think Urawa Red Diamonds and Mitsubishi, Gamba Osaka and Panasonic, Blaublitz Okita and TDK, Cerzo Osaka and Yanmar, and so on).

The city and prefecture of Gifu had their own club, playing in relative obscurity in the Tōkai Soccer League before a couple of championships took the local pride to the Japan Football League. The club’s name? Why, Seino Transportation Soccer Club of course! A works team of Seino and playing in blue, the club was dedicated to its amateur status and had little interest in going professional, even as speculation mounted in the late 80’s regarding the founding of the J.League. When the professional competition was launched in 1992, Seino would have nothing to do with it and continued to play as amateurs, but were soon forced into a choice as the Japan Football League they were playing in would be mothballed and relaunched as a pro competition following the 1998 season.

In what one could describe as being a ‘ragequit’, Seino pulled the plug on its team following the 1997 season and pulled, while most of the other JFL teams went on to play in the new J2 League. Being forced to go pro did not fit with Seino’s ‘amateur spirit’, and thus Gifu prefecture was left without a team.

A view of Gifu City

Until 2002 anyway, when Yasuyuki Moriyama, a succesful striker at Nagoya Grampus and Gifu-native, was inspired to step down from the J.League and play well below his level at a tiny Gifu team called Gifu Stickleback in the lower Prefectural League. Convincing a number of former teammates to join him on his adventure from 2005 onwards, Stickleback (by then already renamed to FC Gifu) started dominating the league. Veterans of Seino including former head coach Masayuki Katsuno (who sadly passed away late last year) were also involved while the project was led by the Gifu University of Economics. Securing a spot in the second division of the Tōkai League, Gifu swiftly claimed promotion by beating Honda FC and entered the Japan Football League (third tier back then) by 2007.

Moriyama’s decision to drop down the leagues and join Stickleback was partially informed by drinking with his mates but perhaps mostly inspired by Gifu prefecture’s status as a redheaded stepchild of sorts compared to the greater Nagoya area south of its borders. After all, it is Nagoya where the big businesses (including some of FC Gifu’s sponsors) and succesful J.League team are located – whereas Gifu is oft overlooked for consisting of commuter towns that sprang up in its southern half as a result of Nagoya’s success and mostly rural country in its northern half. A bit of an underdog tale, FC Gifu’s rise allowed the people in Gifu to have a team of their own to take pride in, rather than make the trek southward to see Grampus play in Nagoya

Although it took longer than the club had hoped for, associate member status of the J.League, one of the two prerequisites for promotion to the second tier, was achieved. The other prerequisite, finishing high enough in the league table, was achieved on the final day of the season via a 2-0 win over now-defunct Arte Takasaki; this result saw Gifu finish third, where they had to finish fourth or higher (the final day victory ensured that ALO’s Hokuriku and Honda FC could not pip the men in green down to fifth). With both conditions satisfied, Gifu were subjected to and subsequently passed a final check by the J.League administrators, and were promoted to J2.

With J2 status secured, the club settled in comfortably amongst the professionals. Perhaps a bit too comfortable even, as it recorded its highest ever finish as early as 2009, its second season in the league, by coming in 12th out of 18 teams. However, as the league started expanding and relegation was introduced, Gifu’s prospects became increasingly muddled by having to face teams with deep pockets and larger catchment areas.

It wasn’t until 2019, the club’s 12th consecutive year in J2, that disaster truly struck. Having flirted with relegation many times before and coming out on top every single time, Gifu were now cut adrift well before the end of the season and finished in last place in the league, ten points and a goal difference of 25 behind ‘safe’ Tochigi SC.

As such, Gifu – long-time stalwarts of J2 – will start in J3 when the new season kicks off in February. The 2019 shirt, which is defined by a gradient from light to dark green, will thus not be dear to many fans, but the 2018 shirt that we have on show today might elicit better memories.

After all, while not a stellar season, 2018 did see the club to safety – collecting 42 points and staying well ahead of relegated Kamatamare Sanuki and Roasso Kumamoto (ironically the team that was promoted to J2 alongside Gifu in 2007). The club paired these shirts with dark green shorts (with an odd white panel situated above the buttocks) and socks, while the players’ names and numbers were done up in white. As per tradition, the numbers also appear on the front of the shirts.

For 2020, fans can at least take solace in having an amazing new home kit, as per the graphic provided by New Balance aboven; two truncated stripes in light green on a dark green base – proving that the 2018 shirt wasn’t just a fluke in terms of how good multiple shades of green can look when used in conjunction with one another.

Seeing all the sponsors sans ‘Pure water’ (which disappeared from the shirts ahead of 2019) continue even into J3 is a positive reaffirmation of the corporate support the club enjoys, and it will be interesting to see how fans react to going into matches as the clear favourite. After all, where Gifu was a lower midtable team at best in J2 for over a decade, they are now a big fish in a slightly smaller pond. Definitely a team to keep your eye on as they fight to bounce back with promotion immediately.

The club’s Facebook page is a good way of keeping up with them, as is the official site; for coverage in English, make sure you follow Gifu fan Sushi Football on Twitter. As for us, hopefully this won’t be the last shirt we cover from the Japanese lower league – although that remains highly dependent on figuring out where to get them for a reasonable price. This Gifu shirt, meanwhile, is going to have a nice place in the collection among our other Japanese shirts.

That’s just about all you need from us for now, but as always, we would like to remind you that Club 25 is a weekly publication – expect a brand new article from us next week, so keep checking back for when we have a new shirt going live. Additionally, keep up to date with us on our Twitter page and flick through the site’s Shirt Archive to see what shirts we’ve covered in the past.