Excluding the company name → Young-myeon, who created the most popular team in the J League, why did he oppose it with a flag
Dec 19, 2024
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Watanabe is the owner of the Yomiuri Giants, Japan's most popular team, who boasted a powerful manpower. He used his status as the owner of the Yomiuri team, which is supported by more than half of the Japanese people, to exert a great influence on the professional baseball world. The Yomiuri team also won criticism and praise for making strict rules for maintaining dignity and insisting that only former Yomiuri players and coaches can serve as coaches. Despite the newspaper's tendency to represent conservative right-wing opinions, he is also famous for taking the lead in criticizing politicians whenever they visit Yasukuni shrine, where war criminals are incorporated.
Watanabe once had a huge influence in the Japanese professional soccer J-League.
It is now through Tokyo Verdi 1969, which has become a civic club. In the 1980s, when Japan began its World Cup hosting activities as Yomiuri FC in 1969, Kazuyoshi Miura, Hui Ramos, and Tetsuji Hashiratani were brought in and reigned as the 'absolute first round'. In 1993, the first year of the J-League, he participated as Verdi Kawasaki. Until 1994, he won two consecutive league-cup tournaments, continuing the same path as the 'football version of the Yomiuri Giants'.
Watanabe, however, withdrew from Verdi's management in 1998.
The cause was a conflict with the J-League's first chairman, Saburo Kawabuchi. Since the launch of the J League, Chairman Kawabuchi has demanded a unification plan that the name of the club should be excluded from the name of the parent company and go only by the name of the region.
Watanabe, who even added the name 'Yomiuri Nippon FC' in addition to the club name Verdi Kawasaki, said "Companies grow sports. One dictator doesn't grow up by risking a fanciful, abstract ideology," he said, setting up a blade in Kawabuchi's chair. "There is no need for teaching staff in the J-League (named by Yomiuri Giants)Chairman Kawabuchi, who had argued that "Tell the dictator that he is a dictator Glory" did not back down, responding. Eventually, Yomiuri left, and Verdi, who also left Nihon TV in the mid-2000s, went down the road.
Watanabe set up a J-League match even after leaving Verdi. When Yokohama Flugels, which was supported by Japan Airlines, merged with Yokohama Marinos, whose parent company is Nissan Motor, in 1999, he said, "The current system must be reviewed. If the chairman does not step down, the J-League will collapse as it is." Japanese sports magazine Nikkan Sports recalled that Watanabe expressed reconciliation with Kawabuchi in an interview.
The two giants were sharply divided over the box office and the future. The direction of 'development' was the same. Thirty years later, the J-League has now grown into a league that looks at the world beyond the K-League and Asia. I'm curious about Watanabe's eternal gaze.
ppark@sportschosun.com
