How a provincial Belgian club became Japan’s talent factory

In the summer of 2018, after Japanese internet company DMM.com completed the purchase of Sint-Truiden V.V. (STVV) from former Charlton Athletic owner Roland Duchatelet, the Belgian club’s new chief executive Takayuki Tateishi met with the Japan men’s national team manager Hajime Moriyasu.

“I told him that, one day, I want the centre line of the Japan team to all be STVV players,” Tateishi tells The Athletic.

Eight years on, the spine of the Japan side is indeed dipped in the blue and yellow colours of Sint-Truiden, just as Tateishi dreamed it might.

Japan’s goalkeeper is Zion Suzuki, who signed for them from Urawa Red Diamonds as a 20-year-old in summer 2023 and was sold to Parma of Italy for €8million (£7m; $9.2m at the current rates) a year later. At centre-back, you will find STVV’s current captain Shogo Taniguchi and Takehiro Tomiyasu, now of Ajax. The latter moved to the Belgian club from Avispa Fukoka back home in January 2018 and joined Bologna for €9m after 18 months before continuing on to Arsenal and now his current side in Amsterdam.

In midfield, Liverpool’s Wataru Endo has 72 caps and spent two seasons as a Sint-Truiden player before a transfer to Germany’s Stuttgart, while Crystal Palace’s Daichi Kamada had a year there on loan after earning his big move to Eintracht Frankfurt, also of Germany. And up front there’s Keisuke Goto, who is currently on loan at STVV from countrymen Anderlecht and is the third-leading scorer in the Belgian top flight this season with 10 goals.

“I wanted more, but that was his (coach Moriyasu) limit,” jokes Tateishi. “The number is important, and I am happy with how far some of those players have come, but I also want to help develop players at the very, very top level for Japan.”

Moriyasu did not prioritise selecting Sint-Truiden players for the national team in order to promote the Japanese-owned club, rather it happened because they started platforming the best talents coming out of his homeland.

Signings numbers one, two and three were Tomiyasu, Endo and Kamada. After that, he had proof of concept and sound networks supplying him.

The long-term result is that there will be seven STVV players, past or present, in the Japan squad facing England in a friendly at Wembley Stadium in London on Tuesday.

Taniguchi and Goto are the club’s only two current representatives in the national team, but defensive midfielder Joel Chima Fujita — who dictated the game in the 1-0 victory over Scotland on Saturday — left for Germany’s St. Pauli just last summer after two successful seasons with them. French side Reims’ forward Keito Nakamura also spent a season there. Had Tomiyasu and Endo been fit, the total would be nine — over a third of the squad.

It is an outsized contribution for a club who have never won the Belgian league or cup and hail from a town of just 40,000 people that is best known for growing fruit.

The success is testament to Tateishi’s vision for a home away from home, inspired by the national’s team breakthrough at the 2002 men’s World Cup, which Japan co-hosted with South Korea.

This generation of Japanese talent is following the path of the trailblazers who moved to Europe over the past 25 years: Hidetoshi Nakata impressed in Serie A for Perugia (1998-2000), Roma (2000-01) and Parma (2001-04); Junichi Inamoto was signed by Arsene Wenger for Arsenal in 2001 and spent almost a decade in European football; Shinji Ono was with Feyenoord of the Netherlands for four years from 2001-05, helping win the UEFA Cup (today’s Europa League) in his debut season and Shunsuke Nakamura was worshipped for as long at Scotland’s Celtic (2005-09), scoring a spectacular 30-yard free-kick as they beat Manchester United in the 2006-07 Champions League.

Tateishi, during his time as general manager of FC Tokyo, hoped to support a second wave of Japanese talent in the European game by discounting transfer fees to incentivise buyers. But when the national team failed to kick on and the value of players from Japan also stagnated, he decided that he had to be active on the other side of the transaction.

He successfully lobbied billionaire Keishi Kameyama, owner of DMM.com, to purchase a mid-tier European club so they could be a bridge to the top of European football. In the eight years since, STVV have signed 29 Japanese players, with 26 of them making the first team, amassing a total of 1,132 appearances.

“In the beginning it was difficult, but they see STVV as the perfect club to get used to the environment and the playing style of Europe,” Tateishi says.

Most of those making the move are young players who view Sint-Truiden as a safe landing zone as they attempt to make their name in Europe. A few are prospects who have gone to a big club and need games to adapt to the game in Europe, so come for the supportive environment. Others are stellar names who make a pit stop in the twilight of their career, such as Shinji Kagawa (32 when he signed) and Shinji Okazaki (34).

Six of STVV’s most-used XI this season are Japanese: goalkeeper Leo Kokubo, 25, was signed from Portuguese giants Benfica’s B team; Taniguchi, 34, came from Al Rayyan of Qatar; left-back Taiga Hata, 24, joined from second-division club Shonan Bellmare back home; playmaker Rihito Yamamoto, 24, did the same from Gamba Osaka and attacking midfielder Ryotaro Ito, 28, from Albirex Niigata of Japan’s top division; plus there is Goto, 20, who went to Brussels-based Anderlecht from Jubilo Iwata in January last year.

“We expect three or four to be sold this summer,” said Tateishi. “Yamamoto will maybe go for the same record as Suzuki.”

He has the next raft of incoming players identified ahead of that summer window. His extensive network of contacts, bolstered by the club’s Brazilian sporting director Andre Pinto, who he previously worked with as a scout at FC Tokyo, means they can move quickly.

The challenge of integrating Japanese players remains.  Tateishi takes it upon himself to dine with new arrivals, teaching them about this new culture. The official team language at the club is English, so prospective signings start lessons in it before they move.

He never wants to be accused of using STVV solely as a platform for Japanese players, though. He believes it is important the club keep their identity: “I want to keep it around seven Japanese players in the squad. It is more important for us to have a good squad that can compete at the top, so we want to develop local Belgian players too.”

The club have also been bolstered by further investment, first from Septeni Holdings in 2023 and then in July last year from Japanet, a leading home shopping and mail-order company, which purchased a 19.9 per cent shareholding. Japanet also owns a club of its own in V-Varen Nagasaki, who play in the J1 League, the top division back home.

“It is in the south of Japan. So it’s not like the big cities — Tokyo and Osaka,” Tateishi says. “To develop their club, they were looking for a club to invest in in Europe, so they can develop players who can move there and eventually play for Japan. It is like a multi-club ownership model.”

It adds to STVV’s stable of five partnership teams: Avispa Fukuoka, FC Tokyo, Fagiano Okayama (all J1), Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo and Oita Trinita (both in the second-tier J2). They face increased competition, however, with bigger European sides buying players directly from Japanese clubs in recent years.

“When we started, there were only three Japanese players in Belgium. Now there are 25 players (combined in) the first and second divisions,” Tateishi says. “Across Europe, there are 150, so that makes it difficult to sign the best talent directly from Japan.”

The point is underlined by the fact that 15 of the 27 players in the squad to face England this week are at clubs in the top five leagues of Europe: nine in Germany, three in England, two in France and one in Italy. Four more play in the Netherlands, plus the three in Belgium and one each in Scotland and Denmark. Only three are based in Japan, and two of those are goalkeepers.

Tateishi, who has only recently hired a scout to keep tabs on the youth players and university talents in his homeland, is determined to stay ahead of the game: “I am planning to open an STVV academy in Japan. We want to get it up and running as soon as possible, because European clubs like Paris Saint-Germain are starting next season with their own academy.

“They recognise the potential, so we need to compete with them. Of course, if they can (come through to) play at STVV that is great, but if they make it to the J-League, then that is a success. PSG is the first club but Barcelona also have plans and Borussia Monchengladbach are opening one in Hokkaido, in the north.

“They need to understand the sports culture of Japan. It is heavily influenced by the U.S., so there are a lot of high school and university teams competing at the same high level as the academies. To convince parents of the university players to leave education before they have completed (their studies) is difficult, so that is a reason European clubs are trying to approach younger players.

“There are some who have left for Europe at 18 already, but there is not one single story of a player succeeding who went straight to Europe. The J-League is very important to their development.”

Sint-Truiden are not content to be a launching pad. Having never finished higher than seventh before, they are currently third. Until two recent defeats in succession, they were mounting a genuine title bid.

Though the Belgian Pro League’s unusual format — the top six teams in the table have their points totals from the 30 regular-season matches halved before they enter a championship round in which they each face the other five, home and away, to decide the title — means STVV are not completely out of contention yet.

“Of course, we want to win the league eventually, but we still have to grow first,” Tateishi says. “We have the 10th or 11th budget out of 16 teams. Last season, our sporting budget was 13th or 14th. We want to continue the momentum but we can’t invest prior to the success. We can only invest from the profits we make and finishing in the top six to get into Europe.

“When I joined the club, for us to cover the losses and get €15million transfer profit, we would have to sell five or six players. But to make that (amount of money) now we only need to sell two, and it makes it easier for us to have a stronger squad.”

They will look to the table’s current leaders, and reigning Belgian champions, Union Saint-Gilloise, for belief.

Last season, USG climbed from third place in the regular season to overtake Genk and Club Brugge.

It is their broader underdog story that is the bigger inspiration, though. USG ended a 90-year wait for their 12th league title, having only won promotion from the second division in 2020. Owned by Tony Bloom, who also owns Premier League club Brighton & Hove Albion and has a large stake in Scottish Premiership leaders Heart of Midlothian, the Brussels side have leveraged data provided by Jamestown Analytics to outperform richer rivals.

“They have the analytics tools that Brighton and Hearts use. It’s brilliant, but their style is not beautiful. It is very efficient. They score a lot from set pieces,” Tateishi says. “They are smart to choose what is important to them and what is not. With a limited budget, you can’t have everything.”

STVV have their own differentiating factor: that deep pool of Japanese talent they are able to draw on. And Tateishi hopes those players can help his country’s national team make their mark on football’s biggest stage, the World Cup, come June and July.

“Japan to beat England in the final,” he grins.

Or should that read Sint-Truiden?