The Hidetoshi Nakata Blueprint
The Hidetoshi Nakata Blueprint
Japan's playmaker prototype
Last week, Nuneaton Borough went to the wall. After a calamitous takeover and ongoing stadium issues, they resigned from the Southern League and revealed that they were looking into liquidation.
Quite who “they” refers to is unclear but the situation with their Liberty Way stadium was a millstone around the neck of a club that might have operated differently and still ended up homeless.
Borough’s relationship with their landlord was problematic and not weighted in their favour. They weren't wanted there and they were essentially evicted months ago.
My team, Coventry Sphinx, were supposed to play them at Liberty Way in the Birmingham Senior Cup in November. That game was played at the Sphinx.
A subsequent show of hosting generosity from Stratford Town and a groundshare agreement with Barwell weren't enough. By Christmas, Nuneaton were without a ground and effectively without an owner. Their demise was inevitable.
The announcement last week brought the stadium issue to a head and, perhaps, confirmed the reasons behind the new owners walking away within days. Borough were not welcome at Liberty Way and no future ownership of the club would be welcome either.
It's all very unedifying and deeply tragic for the supporters. I have no connection to Nuneaton Borough but I lived in the town for years. I've been watching, shocked but not surprised, as a tier seven football club vanishes.
It's another reminder to the rest of us that stability off the pitch has to be the priority at every level of the game.
The Hidetoshi Nakata Blueprint
Cult hero. It’s a label that oozes unbridled affection. It eschews the nitty gritty and speaks of a boundless, enveloping love. It’s wholesome and true. Yet it’s also a qualifier. A cult hero is flawed by definition, their failings laced into the fabric of the label itself. As such, it’s an attachment that can be reductive. Occasionally it’s almost offensive.
Every now and again you’ll see Hidetoshi Nakata written up as a cult hero. It’s the faintest of praise for a football pioneer. Nakata was Japan’s first great modern maverick and an international style icon. He burned brightly in Europe and then retired at 29 just because. Combined, his career and legacy ushered in a whole new way for Japanese players to embrace football and fame.
Nakata had the quickest of feet and an electric turn of pace across the grass. He beat players with ease, his balance and strength making it nearly impossible to knock him off the ball. Though he was a skilled technician, Nakata’s dribbling style was more chaos than craft. It was raw. It was improvised. He showed defenders the ball before nicking it away from their toes.
Acceleration enabled that and was a big part of his game. At full pelt, Nakata’s legs were a blur. But he was also a fabulous passer with vision, and was full of flicks with purpose. If the simple effectiveness of the Cruyff Turn is a matter of form following function, Nakata was Japanese football’s Bauhaus.
His style was the result of total ball mastery and supreme confidence in his ability. It didn’t always come off but it was seldom less than thrilling. He scored some spectacular goals – in Italy especially – and what was striking about them was the variety: one famous overhead kick, a handful of long-distance thunderbolts, some cracking volleys and clever chips, and at least one diving header. He made more than a few, too.
Japan hasn’t had many players of his kind. Who has? None has been as good and few have been close to his international status. He blazed a trail to follow for generations of creative Japanese players, his influence undeniable in the swagger of Keisuke Honda, the effectiveness of Shinji Kagawa and the progression of many players besides. The gloriously intense Yuma Suzuki is an uncapped acolyte.
Nakata was all of these successors rolled into one. In the beginning, there was a choice. Football won out; baseball’s loss. As a youngster he played for Bellmare Hiratsuka (now Shonan Bellmare) in what’s now J1 League, Japan’s top flight.
He made his name in international football. After representing Japan in two matches in Florida at the Olympic Games in 1996, Nakata made his senior debut against South Korea the following year.
Japan played in the World Cup finals for the first time in 1998 and Nakata caught the eye in the spotlight. He was snapped up by Perugia and became the second Japanese player to feature in Serie A. The first was Kazuyoshi Miura, who had a spell on loan at Genoa four years earlier and is still playing at the age of 56.
Roma followed. Nakata was a Scudetto winner under Fabio Capello in 2001 and added a Coppa Italia win as a Parma player in 2002. His move to Emilia-Romagna made him the most expensive Asian player up to that point and far beyond, an accolade befitting of his stature in the world game.
Japan co-hosted the World Cup that year and Nakata played all four of their matches, scoring his only World Cup finals goal with his head and a little good fortune to end a measured passing move in a group stage win against Tunisia.
Halfway through Nakata’s third season at Parma he was loaned to Bologna, before a permanent switch to Fiorentina in the summer of 2004 and another loan – this time to Bolton Wanderers in the Premier League – in 2005/06. If Sam Allardyce wondered where Nakata would be playing his football after the World Cup in Germany, he’ll have been surprised by the answer.
A few days before Zinedine Zidane exited the world stage in the full glare of the international media, Nakata hung up his boots at the age of 29. He’d played all three of Japan’s matches at the World Cup and immediately retired. An Italian championship, three World Cups and a stack of individual honours later, the little boy who chose football had fallen out of love with playing.
It’s easy to aggrandise great players with the benefit of hindsight. Nakata beat a new path in Europe but loans away from both Parma and Fiorentina were indicative of an element of decline. Imperfections shouldn’t diminish his legacy, though. At his best, Nakata was a phenomenon.
But perhaps what most sets Nakata apart is what he’s done since leaving the game. In life, as he was in football, he’s diligent and logical, artistic and curious, and he knows how to maximise his enjoyment from that unorthodox combination.
The “best-dressed footballer on the planet” has modelled for Calvin Klein and regularly attends fashion shows. He created a tastemaker website and was given the honorary role of editor-at-large for a lifestyle magazine in Japan.
Nakata is an impossibly passionate and quite brilliant sake entrepreneur. He creates his own sakes and built an app designed to educate users about them. It all came about after a seven-year exploration of Japanese cultures and an identity he felt he hadn’t fully understood before becoming a man of the world at 21.
The core idea behind Nakata’s business was to build the absent infrastructure required to market and export craft sake. Founded in 2015, it’s gone on to develop a sake cellar concept and a sake blockchain.
“It is the logistics to trace and record each sake bottle through the entire distribution route from the brewery, the exporter, the importer, the warehouses in-between and to the final destinations such as retailers and restaurants,” he told Forbes.
“Sake remains refrigerated seamlessly throughout the route in temperature-controlled containers at -5°C/23°F and each step is easily operated by scanning a 2D code.”
He’s come a long way since Bellmare Hiratsuka. In 2022, Nakata added Hanaahu tea to his portfolio. It’s a luxury tea brand created with food pairings in mind. Naturally, it’s grown and produced in Japan.
Nakata is the polymath ambassador. He’s famous around the world, a cosmopolitan and multilingual style icon with a World Cup goal to his name, but his business is in promoting the cultures he belatedly discovered in football retirement.
Nakata’s example in football and fame is one for young Japanese players to follow. He’s still there, creating. Still forging ahead and breaking new ground. Still laying the track behind him. On and off the pitch, Nakata showed the way. But the ultimate truth is there might never be another like him in either realm, never mind both.
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“A little lad from the east end of Glasgow got to live his childhood dream for 20 years. Playing at 10 great clubs, meeting amazing people and building relationships with staff and people around those clubs, getting to represent my country, playing over 600+ games, scoring over 100+ goals and 100+ assists is something I wouldn’t have ever imagined doing.”
If the retiring Robert Snodgrass isn’t adored at every one of those ten clubs, I’d be surprised. Thanks for being brilliant, Snoddy. Love you.
Salty beef extracts
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Nottingham Forest knew FFP rules – they chose chaos instead (i)
Gambling ads were all over Ivan Toney’s return – football has learned nothing (i)
Regulation in the time of conspiracy theories is proving a bind for the Premier League (Unexpected Delirium)
Women's Super League: Are clubs doing enough to support mental health? (BBC Sport)
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I’m a director of a team in the same division as Nuneaton. I marvel at the money sloshing around some of the clubs, especially the bigger ones on the way down. We’re smaller, hopefully on the way up, and have the lowest budget in the division - which, of course, is reflected in our position in the table. It’s eye opening, for sure.