This instantly managed to become a favourite of mine, probably the best sports series I've read or watched. In short, this is an edgier spin on sports manga.

In the start I was a bit skeptical, I found the setup a bit cheesy and edgy for the sake of being edgy at first, but oh boy did my opinion change up real quick.

One of the strengths of Blue Lock is definitely its characters. This story manages to take somewhat generic anime/manga tropes and make them new its own in a way. While series like haikyuu tend to focus on character relationships, especially duos, I found that Blue Lock focuses more on building the players individually, and only then forms relationships, while seemingly not being scared to tear them up.

Usually, with sports series I tend to get attached to the characters, and tend to not get that invested in the matches. But here the matches are amazing too. Even if you can already predict who is going to win and lose, they still manage to get you extremely hyped. While reading some of them I was so pumped that I started literally shaking from excitement.

The art also plays a huge role in the enjoyment factor. It's absolutely stunning. The way the player auras are drawn, the eyes THE EYES??!!? so beautiful, the expressions give me chills. Also the artist manages to draw the matches in a way where I, as a person who doesn't know anything about football, sports even, manages to clearly understand everything that is going on. Big props to the artist, great execution.

In terms of pacing, I'm more of a fan of manga with fast pacing (like fujimotos works for example), so i really appreciated that this manga didn't dwell on one arc for too long and cut the unnecessary matches out. Some might find this as a flaw, but I personally really loved that.

Debated a lot if this deserves a 10 or 9, but even tho it might have some minor flaws, I enjoyed this immeasurably. If you haven't read this yet, def give this a try, you won't regret it.