Eleven Friends Who Never Split
This was before the international entertainment machine figured out how to extract our pocket money through limited-edition foil trading cards and branded spinning tops and three different erasable pencil variants featuring the same character’s face. Back then you could just sit down in the afternoon, park yourself on the couch, and watch a group of grinning cartoon teenagers run around a pitch for forty minutes and feel like that was a complete and sufficient use of time. It was. I don’t know when we stopped believing that.
Captain Tsubasa and Kickers were the two soccer anime that owned those afternoons, and I got closer to competitive sport through them than I ever did in actual PE class—where the teachers were either handsy in ways that only became clearly alarming in retrospect, or the older kids had physical opinions about your tracksuit bottoms. The anime was cleaner. More instructive, even.
The choice between them felt real and irresolvable. On one side: Tsubasa, the protagonist of Captain Tsubasa, Yōichi Takahashi’s soccer epic that would eventually inspire an entire generation of actual professional footballers—Zidane, Totti, and Messi all cited it as formative. Team spirit as doctrine. Victory as moral necessity. The character design had a hyper-polished intensity to it, everyone rendered in a state of permanent peak effort. These kids did not play for the love of it. They played to win. They always won.
On the other side: Gregor. Which is what the German dubbing team decided to call the Kickers’ lead, a name that belongs to someone’s uncle who coaches a regional under-twelve team rather than to a soccer hero. His Japanese original was probably Satoshi. Or Mamoru. Or something with enough syllables to defeat any translator working under deadline. Whatever the name, the team around him was something else entirely: eleven friends who genuinely liked each other, which in sports anime terms made them practically alien. They cried. They laughed at themselves. They lost matches they should have won and won matches they had no business winning and didn’t seem to mind either way. Their German theme song was this earnest little earworm about how they’d fall and get back up and take each other’s hands at the end—completely corny and somehow completely right.
Tsubasa was bigger. More important by any objective measure. Even Mila Superstar’s volleyball squad could have taken the Kickers apart without breaking a sweat, and everyone knew it. But the Kickers were recognizable in a way Tsubasa’s crew never quite was—sympathetic screw-ups who played because they wanted to, because it gave them something to talk about on the field, because of nerdy girls watching from the sideline. That was us on those afternoons. Not future champions. Not the protagonists of our own epic. Just kids who sat down with cartoons instead of going outside, and felt, obscurely, that we were exactly where we were supposed to be.
Tsubasa won more matches. The important ones, certainly. But you can admire something and still not want to be near it. The Kickers had my heart. They still do.