Football in Fiction
The first worldwide popular association football-oriented Japanese animation (manga) series, Captain Tsubasa, was started in 1981. Captain Tsubasa was extremely popular among children (boys and girls) in Japan. Its success led to many more association football manga being written, and it played a great role in association football history in Japan. Playing football became more popular than playing baseball in many schools throughout Japan from 1980s due to the series.
Captain Tsubasa has also inspired the likes of prominent footballers such as Hidetoshi Nakata, Seigo Narazaki, Zinedine Zidane, Francesco Totti, Fernando Torres, Christian Vieri, Giuseppe Sculli and Alessandro Del Piero to play association football and choose it as a career.
The anime Giant Killing revolves around a team's efforts to go from one of the worst professional teams in Japan to the best.
Read more about this topic: Football In Japan
Famous quotes containing the words football and/or fiction:
“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)