You ever heard of the Japanese national team striker Mike Havenaar? The name will throw you off but he was born in Hiroshima and raised solely in Japan, by the way of a Dutch father. Japanese family names generally don't sound as windmill-y as his surname. You'd be forgiven in thinking he was some naturalised athlete who was pushed through for a passport by the Japanese Football Association. Many, many countries do such a thing, scouring for any promising player whose grandparent was born in some town in your country, and snapping them up for a full cap, therefore locking them into only being able to repesent them on a national level. Hell, Japan does this quite heavily in another team sport where they aren't world beaters, rugby. Their captain lived in New Zealand for his first 15 years and most of their forwards are Pacific Islanders. Even though you can't buy players, you can still look outside your borders to fill in gaps and improve your level of play.

Back to Mike, he has typical Dutch number 9 attributes; tall, good in the air and able to make his own space. But he was never that good. If you go look at his club history of Wikipedia, you could pick out another entry for some other Japanese could-have-been, mixed them around and I couldn't tell you what one is Mike's. It's the formula of "playing in the J League when you're 18, try yourself out in Europe, play in a top 5 league, drop down the pyramid, and go back to the J League". For the past 30 years, since professional football landed in Japan, many hopefuls try but almost all don't make it. If they do, they fit into the sterotypes of Japanese footballers; small, quick, technical. Wingers, attacking midfielders, ball-playing centre midfielders. The last success Japan had in the final third of the pitch would be Shinji Okazaki with Leicester City in 2016, but his countribution was purely as a second striker to play balls in the channels to more clinical players.

Blue Lock takes this observation of Japanese football and plays with it in a comic format, taking jabs at Japanese quirks and offers a solution in still quite a Japanese fashion, to force a solution. The story revolves around Yoichi Isagi, a normal high school footballer who has normal high school aspirations to go to nationals, bread and butter stuff for a sports manga. He and 300 other high school forwards get invited to a national training camp run by the Japanese footballing body. They all arrive and a cultish puppet master of a sporting director called Jinpachi Ego wants to mould the world's best striker, everyone chases after him towards that dream. What follows is a story of teenage boys being kept in an interment camp where they train and compete with each other to rise out on top, all the while breaking the shackles of "goody-goody" notions of a team sport, but to create a player who is the physical repesentation of the word ego.

We then see the whole spectrum of interpersonal relationships in a ball game. Rivals, allies, betrayal, backstabbing. Even characters with "a lot of resolve". But football is in fact a game played with multiple players on two teams, so the story does have to betray the idea of forming the singular player in order to show us football. Teams are formed, but they are also disbanded. And because this makes up the bulk of football-based chapters, it has to fall into the trap of having characters being inspired by watching other characters playing. But overall it does it best to tie it together as we are marching towards who will be number one, and that leads us to our protag.

Isagi is the safe kind of main character as his growth is around always finding another peak after climbing the mountain. We are first introduced to him as an almost story about his high school team missing out on nationals because he passed to his teammate, and questioning himself about his ability and whether he made the right decision. As we go through the story, he works towards becomming the best piece by piece (and the manga makes sure you know it's piece by piece, as it's always symbolised by a flurry of jigsaw pieces). He comes up against players who start out better, but he catches up and wins over their adoration, making friends or at least mutual respect of his opponents.

Now I understand that sounds like I'm describing most plots for a lot of sports manga, but it works well and it paces its story very well. It allows the story to display meaningful growth and progress without the need for exhaustive tournaments. This is all training arc and it never stops with it. At the end of these matches or events, the story always reminds you that even though there are teams and positions, this is still Isagi's story, and his victory alone. Football manga struggles with this premise and resolution because it wants to repesent football in the way it is in reality, where every goal is built from your team. Baseball manga does not have this problem, the author can either pick the template of relief pitcher or bases-loaded batter, and you have your hero whose thing caused them to win. The premise of Blue Lock allows the story to exist as a baseball manga, but they just kick the ball instead.

But the characters, supporting and main, really don't have much going for them as well-rounded personalities. Isagi's "I play football, I get better" philosophy could of been forgiven if he had a cast of interesting traits and motivations around him, but sadly he does not. Other characters fall into either the "hot-blooded, bleached haired rough boys", "quiet and princely narcissists" and "kooky and aloof weirdos" archetype. And it's difficult to resolve with typical manga means, as you can't go too slice of life as they are not in high school, and girls are banned. You can't go too dramatic as boys don't cry. Artstyles in such genres like these don't really change, as they need to be able to show fluidity in a static medium, so there's a lot of heavy outlines and diagonal artwork to suggest motion. The characters designs are on par for what you would expect for a manga being published in 2021, no one will have any harsh objections to it.

So Blue Lock, it's pretty good. It takes an observation on football and explores it without losing respect for the sport, and it does something pretty much every other football manga has failed to do: make a comic read like a highlight reel, rather than bore like watching a nil-nil draw for 90 minutes.