Maya Yoshida - Unbeatable Mind

Every time I made a step forwards, to reach a higher level or rank, there came new rivals. As soon as I thought I had beaten my competition, there was another rival to beat. I tried to keep on running, but hurdles kept on appearing in my path.

The biggest motivation for me when I started out in the academy at Grampus, realising for the first time how fierce the competition would be within the team, was the awareness that I simply could not go back to Nagasaki without giving it proper time. And the fact that I managed to overcome the initial pressure was, I believe, down to my nature. I hate losing. I don’t want to be a loser in whatever I do, so I turn the sense of urgency which comes from thinking ‘I can’t lose’ into positive energy to reach my goal, instead of merely putting even more pressure onto myself. That is how I keep on running this long hurdle race that is the career of a footballer.

I wasn’t a prodigy or an elite youth player who had been developed at the academy of a professional club from the age of six or seven. I was just a kid who played football in a local school team, and I had something of an ‘I-am-a-nobody’ complex when I joined the Grampus academy. So when I saw other academy players, part of me was simply impressed by their abilities while another part was thinking, ‘I don’t want to lose against them no matter what.’ It was the same when I got my first call-up to the national youth team or the Japan senior side. I always had this ‘me against the elites’ feeling inside me.

I believe there are many people with a similar complex around the world, including in Japan and the United Kingdom. I also believe it is possible for anyone to deal with such a feeling of inferiority in a positive way. Thinking that you don’t want to be beaten by it gives you mental strength – ‘anti-complex power’, if I may call it that. And that is certainly a part of the resilience that has helped this Japanese defender end up plying his trade in the Premier League.

By mental strength, I don’t mean something that only a spiritual seeker can master, as though a professional athlete must become a practitioner of stoicism or asceticism. I did try to stay away from snacking and drinking fizzy drinks in my early teens, but what seems equally important to me nowadays, as a professional footballer, in order to develop or use my resilience is being able to switch oneself on and off effectively in one’s daily life. It is more important if you play abroad because you are likely to spend more time by yourself than when you are in your native country, especially right after your transfer to a different country, where thinking about football, about what you should or shouldn’t do as a player all the time, might lead to being too hard on yourself and have a negative effect on you, especially as you are under pressure to perform straight away.

Fortunately, I have always been quite good at dealing with life. Even after a defeat or poor individual performance, I rarely feel down once I’m home. I know when I must be switched on and when I can switch myself off as a footballer. There is always something else to take my mind away from football if needed. I’m innately curious; I’ve always been that way.

For instance, when I moved from Nagasaki to Nagoya and realised that there was a tough road ahead at the academy for me, it wasn’t as though I couldn’t think about or do anything other than football. My junior high-school days were not only about football. It was the time when a manga titled BECK was popular in Japan, and I wanted to have the same electric guitar – a telecaster – that the main character played in the story.

Of course I begged and begged my oldest brother, who at the time was also my guardian, to buy me one. One day, after two hours of my begging and his refusal, and getting fed up with each other (it was, I have to admit now, a case of little brother behaving badly), he finally gave in and bought me the guitar I wanted. Needless to say, I was grinning from ear to ear, hugging my precious instrument and snuggling up to my brother sitting next to me on our train journey home. On Mondays, I sometimes enjoyed playing the guitar with my friends after school as there was no team training at the academy.

At the moment, Maya Yoshida the guitarist is in semi-retirement, or has been forced to be so, to be more precise. My guitar has been locked away somewhere in our house so that there is no chance of my baby daughter knocking it down by accident and harming herself. Might I need some resilience to fight off an occasional urge to take out the guitar and play? Probably not. Maya Yoshida the husband and father gladly takes a back seat to his beloved wife and daughter.

High school is hell

As Maya Yoshida the footballer, I basically don’t want to be behind anyone. I don’t want to feel inferior to anybody. And that is why I chose to go to a prefectural high school (age 16 to 18), instead of going to an independent one that was in partnership with the club, even though I was already determined to be a professional footballer by then.

My attitude towards becoming a professional had changed gradually over the course of three years in junior high school. First, I only thought, ‘I should at least give it a real go.’ Then I started to feel, ‘I really want to be a professional.’ And in the end, I simply thought, ‘I’ll be a professional footballer,’ without any doubts.

But pursuing a career as a footballer also made me aware of another anxiety I had inside me. I always thought that people might see me as a boy who wouldn’t be able do anything properly apart from playing football because I’d left home early and wasn’t under the guidance of my parents from a young age. I felt I had to do something to change that perception, for I would hate to be seen that way.

Tuition is much cheaper at a prefectural school. My mum used to tell me in a light-hearted fashion, ‘You go to a state school because an independent school is too expensive for us.’ But my going there was mainly because of my determination to stop people viewing me in a negative way. I didn’t want them saying, ‘Maya lacks common sense because all he has done is to play football,’ or ‘Maya can’t do anything else,’ so I decided to go to a prefectural high school, even if it meant I had to study for the entrance exam (the equivalent of GSCE in the UK). I just couldn’t accept the idea that I might be labelled as someone who would be useless and worthless apart from his ability at football.

I passed the exam and enrolled at Toyota Senior High School. I’d succeeded in what I set out to do but felt miserable right away. As soon as my high-school life began, I felt as though I couldn’t continue. The first thing my form teacher said was, ‘There’s never been a professional footballer or baseball player from this school.’ I understood that this was intended to encourage me, and other students, to study hard so that we might go on to university or college, but it still felt like I had been dealt a major setback from the get-go. I remember thinking as the teacher spoke, ‘You’ll be eating your words some day.’

My team-mates at the Grampus academy were all going to the club-affiliated private high school, which was much closer to the club’s residence hall. I, too, had moved in there after finishing junior high school, but I was going to a different high school. So I had to get up earlier than anyone in the team to start a 30-minute bike ride there every day, sometimes against the elements.

My time at the school was even harder. Although I knew it would be the case, being a youth player at Grampus meant nothing to the teachers and I wasn’t treated any differently to the other students, including in the amount of homework I was given. I got tons.