Earlier this month on the Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast, Raphael Honigstein summarised the joy of the Bundesliga thusly: “Bayern are a freak team … but people inside Germany don’t really care that much because for the other 17 teams, this is the most open league anywhere in Europe. You don’t know if your team is going to fight relegation; they might make the Champions League, they might be mid-table. You have absolutely no idea from week to week what’s happening. And people love the fact that their sides have a real, meaningful season ahead of them.”

It is perhaps little wonder that so many Japanese players, from the returning Shinji Kagawa at Borussia Dortmund to the free-scoring Shinji Okazaki at Mainz, have settled into the ways of German football so smoothly. Twenty-one years since its inauguration, the J League continues to provide absorbingly unpredictable competition which parallels the Bundesliga for drama in all but one key aspect – there is no freak team.

The best-supported club, Urawa Reds, can clinch the J1 title this weekend just as they did eight years ago with victory at home to Gamba Osaka. However, 2006 was the only season to date where the side from Saitama have finished on top of the pile, and a history of late slip-ups means that none of the 60,000-plus Reds fans expected to turn out on Saturday will be counting their chickens just yet. Most famously, in 2007, Urawa collapsed in the wake of continental exertions and failed to win any of their last five league games; a shock final-day defeat at long previously relegated Yokohama FC allowed Kashima Antlers to complete an improbable 10-point turnaround.

Of more immediate relevance, the momentum right now is with Gamba, who will be returning to the site of their J League Cup final victory over outgoing J1 title-holders Sanfrecce Hiroshima two weeks ago. When the top flight paused for its two-month World Cup break in May, the 2008 Asian champions were in the relegation zone with just 15 points from their opening 14 games; concerned less with overhauling a 14-point gap to Urawa than with avoiding an immediate return to the ignominy of J2, where they had spent last term after a disastrous change in management the year before. Instead, buoyed by the explosive form of their fit-again former academy striker Takashi Usami – who sat on the bench for Bayern Munich in the 2012 Champions League final – the Osakans have soared up the table with 13 wins from 17 since the resumption of play, to stand in second.

Gamba’s turnaround under the stewardship of the former Japan international Kenta Hasegawa has been all the sweeter for their notoriously vocal supporters due to the failings of their neighbours to the south. Cerezo Osaka enjoyed a sudden surge in popularity last year – especially among female fans – due to the presence of a number of young national-team starlets, and were many observers’ favourites for silverware when their parent company, Yanmar, broke the bank to acquire the services of the Uruguay legend Diego Forlán in January. But the former Manchester United man has found the net only seven times and, with his fellow forward Yoichiro Kakitani upping sticks for Basel in mid-season, Cerezo have replaced their city rivals in the bottom three. Defeat away to fellow strugglers Vegalta Sendai this weekend could confirm their relegation.

Yet as remarkable as the resurgence in the northern half of Osaka has been, by Japanese standards it is far from unique. Led by the Brazilian tactician Nelsinho Baptista, perennial yo-yo club Kashiwa Reysol beat off the challenge of Gamba and Nagoya Grampus to clinch the J1 crown in 2011 a year after promotion as champions of J2. Gamba themselves are no strangers to late-season title pushes, either. At the halfway mark of the 2009 campaign, they sat fully 19 points behind the runaway leaders, Kashima, only to close to within three ahead of an effective title decider on the penultimate weekend, when the Antlers ran out 5-1 winners.

A five-point gap this time with three to play means that even victory would not bring Gamba’s fate into their own hands, but Urawa have the harder run-in and must travel to fourth-placed Sagan Tosu on 29 November. The small provincial club from the island of Kyushu – Sagan’s 24,000-capacity stadium would accommodate almost exactly a third of Tosu city’s population – are still just about in the title picture themselves, but for their fans and romantic neutrals it is a case of what might have been after Yoon Jung-hwan, their South Korean manager, was let go in August due to an internal conflict with the side top of the table. This, again, was not an entirely new storyline in the J League soap opera. The coach Zdenko Verdenik pulled off a record 21-game unbeaten sequence to first save Omiya Ardija from relegation in 2012 then lead them to the summit midway through last season; but all was not well behind the scenes, the Slovenian was fired, and Omiya promptly went on a run of 16 losses in 17 to wind up 14th.

Such unlikely storylines and fluctuations of fortune are partly evidence of a league still in the early stages of maturity; and partly the result of the firm community roots embedded in the J League regulations to prevent the emergence of corporate franchises such as the Yomiuri Giants, who have dominated Nippon Professional Baseball. However, Japanese domestic football is approaching a serious crossroads. Attendances have stagnated since the exploits of Kagawa, Keisuke Honda, and Yuto Nagatomo triggered an outflow of talent to Europe at the beginning of this decade. With sponsors beginning to lack confidence, the organisers have panicked – from next year, the traditional league format will be replaced by a two-stage season with play-offs.

The move drew widespread outrage from match-going fans when it was originally announced last summer. Gōru-ura (behind-the-goal) terraces across the country were decorated with angry banners as supporters united to denounce the desecration of their famously competitive top flight. Embattled J League officials dealt with the backlash by encouraging broadcast partners to point their cameras away from the stands.

“Average crowd figures have fallen from over 19,000 to around 17,000 in the last five years,” explained Daisuke Nakanishi, the J League’s director of competitions, to J Sports. “Even when 62,000 people turned out to see Yokohama F Marinos play Albirex Niigata last November, with the championship on the line, the television audience share on NHK was only 3.5%. We needed to act to attract new spectators. Winner-takes-all matches are easier for non-hardcore viewers to understand, so we decided we had to introduce a knockout stage for the trophy at the end of the season.”

One respected television commentator scoffed: “They are just looking for any quick fix. There is no way this will make any difference.” Indeed, the J League were in such a hurry to devise an “easy-to-understand” play-off format that their original proposal was flawed to the point where it could be advantageous for certain teams to deliberately lose second stage matches. This was later revised, but there was still the issue of the Emperor’s Cup – a purely knockout competition dating back to 1921, whose final three or four rounds are traditionally played after the end of the league season in December. If cup-style football is supposed to attract new fans to league football, then why not just use the cup that was there all along?

Nakanishi shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Yes, but the cup is run by the JFA, not by the J League,” he said. “It’s out of our jurisdiction. The sponsors are not our sponsors.”

With a league and association sharing the same headquarters building in Tokyo yet seemingly unable to align their purposes toward common prosperity – and sense – it may be that Japan is the epitome of a leading football nation already. Had the two-stage system been in place this year it would be Gamba going into that Urawa game with a chance of securing the clausura title but, while nobody yet knows for sure what impact the change will have upon perceptions of the league both inside and outside Japan, supporters have generally now resigned themselves simply to enjoying the final “proper” season while it lasts. As one member of the Sledgehamor Bros ultras in Osaka put it: “If Gamba do manage to win the league this year, at least everyone will know for sure we are the real champions.”