Maya Yoshida - Unbeatable Mind

It would be a lie if I said that, as a high-school student, I didn’t feel uncomfortable or like an outsider when all the others in my class were thinking about going on to have a higher education while I was trying to set out on the path to becoming a professional footballer. But quitting school was never an option because I didn’t want to be labelled as someone who could do nothing but football. At the same time, I didn’t want to be viewed by people at the academy as a youth player who couldn’t make it because he was going to a state school. I have always set myself targets that seemed difficult to reach.

At a J.League club, only a few players are given a professional contract at the end of the youth development process (at the age of 18). I have heard that only around 1 per cent of youth graduates at a Premier League club make it, but even in the J.League I reckon that only around 2 per cent of youth players go on to become a professional with their club. I, together with three other youth graduates, was given a professional contract by Grampus, and it was unprecedented in the club’s history that four players from the youth academy were promoted to the first team as professionals at the same time.

In order to pass through such a narrow gate, it is important to have a clear vision of how you’re going to reach a higher standard from an early stage in your development. How far you go depends to a large extent on how high you set your goal as well as the actions you take to reach it. I believe this applies not only to players at youth academies in Japan or at J.League clubs, but also to those playing in any league in any country. It could even be the same for players or competitors in other sports, or for those trying to work their way up in a corporation or organisation.

Of course, on your way to reaching your goal there may be times when you feel as though you’ve hit a wall; you feel inadequate or far behind the others. But you can’t give up or lower your aspirations. You shouldn’t swap the high hurdle in front of you for a lower one, imagining that this will make it easier to continue running. If you have the right mental attitude, a sense of inferiority or impending defeat can be turned into a positive energy, a boost to help you clear the hurdle or smash through the wall. That’s how you get used to clearing hurdles one by one, barely noticing that each gets a little higher along the way. Certainly, that was how this youngest brother of three, who left his home town at the tender age of 12, managed to reach the point where, in my long-distance hurdle race towards a football career, I could see the starting line in terms of becoming a professional player.

CHAPTER 2

Survival instinct

In January 2007 I signed a professional contract with Nagoya Grampus Eight, and began my new challenge in the first team. It didn’t mean I started to play immediately, though. I was only an 18-year-old former youth player there and I had to wait for about two months before making my first-team début. I wasn’t even on the bench for the first two games of the season (the J.League season usually starts late in February or early March and ends in December in the same year). On the day of our opening game at home, I was instead helping the club off the pitch, dealing with ticket distribution before the match.

Back then, I just did whatever jobs I was given without questioning – even if it meant I would play a ‘position’ off the pitch. But now, I wonder if it was one of those typical old Japanese customs: regarding a young player automatically as an apprentice even if he had a professional contract. I don’t think that would be the case here at Southampton. I believe the club treats such players as professionals once they have a professional contract regardless of their age, even if they are still in their teens.

In general, people over here in Europe focus on doing what they are supposed to be doing, whether they are footballers, office workers or shop staff. They tend to stick with doing what they are paid for under their contracts (although I have to admit that this tendency sometimes makes them look a bit too inflexible to me, as someone who is used to a meticulous level of Japanese customer service).

Having said that, I have no complaints whatsoever about the fact that the first-team opportunities for me were hard to come by at the beginning, because, to put it simply, I was around the bottom of the pecking order. I was a nobody from the youth ranks. Many of the players in the team didn’t even know I’d been originally promoted as a defensive midfielder.

A team on the pitch consists of 11 players, of course. Even in a practice game on the training ground, there can only be a total of 22 players from the squad playing at the same time. And I couldn’t even get into those 22 when I initially joined the first team. When I did eventually have a chance to participate in a practice game at the training ground, the position I played in depended on where numbers were short on that particular day. If it happened to be a centre-back position, I was put in the middle of the back line. If an extra defensive midfielder was needed, I played in the middle of the pitch to fill the vacancy.

There was another wall to break through, a bureaucratic one, in terms of becoming a recognised first-team player. Under the J.League regulations, there are three categories for a professional player under contract: Professional A, B and C. I could only be given a Professional C contract, the lowest category as a player with 450 minutes or less of total playing time in the J1 league (the top division in the J.League). And at our training centre, the dressing room for players with a C contract was separated from the one for players with contracts in higher categories.

I found the atmosphere in the dressing room for the C-contract players rather negative. I’d hear comments like ‘I’m not in the team again!’ or ‘I should be playing rather than him because I’m better’ coming from players who had found out that they were not in the starting 11 or who had failed to make the squad travelling to an away game. Watching those around me during the first month I spent there, and feeling that negative atmosphere in the dressing room, I remember starting to feel, ‘I can’t be stuck in here. I’ve got to say goodbye to this dressing room as soon as possible if I want to make it at the top level.’ It was my survival instinct kicking in, urging me to do whatever I could to leave behind me a depressing environment that could have stagnated my professional career just when it had begun.

I tried my best to get closer to the A-contract players, approaching them off the pitch. Being the youngest of three brothers, I’m naturally used to being among my seniors, and was neither reluctant nor uncomfortable to share the company of those older than me. So yes, my resilience, ‘strength of the youngest’, helped me to make progress there. When we had lunch at the club’s canteen after team training, I tried to mingle at a table where the first-team regulars were. I also had the temerity to occupy the back seat on the team coach when travelling.

In Japan, there is an unwritten rule at a football club, and in the national team set-up too, that the back seat of a team coach is reserved for ‘VIPs’ (Very Important Players). At Grampus in my time there, Toshiya-san (Toshiya Fujita) and Nara-san (Seigo Narazaki), who were both in their thirties, and Kei-kun (Kei Yamaguchi), who was in his sixth year in the first team, were the regular occupants of the back seats. (‘San’ is a Japanese honorific suffix added to either the surname or given name of a person to show respect to someone senior or among equals, while ‘kun’ is an honorific common among male friends.) For someone who had just come up from the youth team to sit in the back seat would definitely be going against the rule. But I realised there was always one more space available in the back seat on our team coach, so I summoned up my courage and sat there one day.