Team Data: Sanfrecce Hiroshima
Team Name:
Team Logo & Mascot:  
Team Flag:
Home Uniform Away Uniform
 
Home StadiumHiroshima Big Arch
Seats 55,000
Team Data:
|
Management Corporation: | Sanfrecce Hiroshima Corporation | |
Established: | 24 April 1992
| |
President: | Masatata Kubo
| |
Investors: | Consortium of 59 organisations, including Hiroshima Prefecture, Hiroshima City, Mazda Motor Corporation, DEODEO Corporation, The Chugoku Electric Power Co., Inc. and The Hiroshima Bank, Ltd. | |
Address: | 4-10-2 Kannon Shin-machi,
Nishi-ku Hiroshima City,
Hiroshima 733-0036 | |
Hometown Area: | Hiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture | |
Home Stadium: | Hiroshima Big Arch (capacity: 50,000) | |
Joined J. League: | 1992 | |
Major Titles: | J.League Champions: 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001
Nabisco Cup: 1997, 2000, 2002
Emperor's Cup: 1997, 2000
Xerox Super Cup: 1997, 1998, 1999
|
|
 |
 |
  | |
Sanche & Frecce
The mascot of Sanfrecce Hiroshima, Sanche, is a Japanese black bear -- a fairly common resident of the rugged hilly country that surrounds the city of Hiroshima. The original version of the Sanfrecce mascot was an adult bear with a fairly powerful image and a dangerous gleam in his eye. However, the team gave its entire "corporate look" a makeover in 1996, and changed not only its team logo but also the mascot. Sanche is now a cheeky-looking youngster, and he has a girlfriend named "Frecce". In our opinion the old Sance looked much "tougher", but then, I guess changes to cartoon images that you have grown accustomed to are always a bit hard to "bear". |
 |
|
Sanfrecce Hiroshima is the oldest continuously active team in the J.League, as the historical successor team to Mazda Motor football club, which was founded in 1949. Oddly enough, the team's official publicity department downplays these links. Though many other teams have also distanced themselves from the corporations which gave them birth, in Sanfrecce's case it is a bit difficult to understand, since Mazda has been a fairly generous contributor to the team's development. Perhaps it is more a case of the history being less interesting than the present.
Mazda was not a particularly strong JFL franchise, though the team had a brief flirtation with success just before and after the creation of the J.League, in 1993. The year before the league was created, Mazda Motor finished sixth, and was included one of the original founding teams. The team took the name "sanfrecce, which is an odd combination of the Japanese word for "three" and the Italian word for "arrow". The three arrows is a potent symbol in the Hiroshima area, as it refers to a historical samurai who ruled the area, and who adopted the three arrows as his battle standard. Though the original Sanfrecce team emblem contained visual references to the Mazda legacy, in 2004 the team adopted a new logo which contains more symbolism related to Hiroshima history, including the three arrows referred to in the team name.
Under the tutelage of Stewart Baxter, Sanfrecce Hiroshima had a reasonably successful year in 1993, and then surprised everyone by winning the first stage title in 1994. Sanfrecce subsequently fell to Verdy Kawasaki in the league championship series, but the team was beginning to make a name for itself, behind players like national team striker Takuya Takagi and former Czech national team member Dominic Hasek.
Unfortunately, the success did not last far beyond the departure of Baxter. Scotsman Eddie Thompson took over as coach in 1995, and the team has never been in contention since. Thompson repeatedly argued (and not without some persuasiveness) that the team's problems were largely financial, and the club never provided him with the budget needed to put together a winning team. However, many other observers have noted that Thompson's defensive-minded strategy was ill-suited for the J.League, and point out that more than half of the teams in the league had finances which were even more limited than those at Thompson's disposal. In any event, the team began to lose some of its top players to other teams, and by the time that Thompson left, at the end of the 1999 season, Sanfrecce had slipped down into mid-table obscurity.
Throughout the 1990s, Sanfrecce was a difficult team to beat, even when they were not doing well in the standings. The defensive philosophy developed and instilled under Thompson served them well in terms of limiting the opponent's scoring chances. However, after the departure of players like Takagi and Hasek, the Hiroshima offense was always too limited to contend for a title. Hiroshima also faced a problem that has troubled many other club based in western Japan -- a lack of fan support and, consequently, money. Though it has captured a large and loyal base throughout the eastern half of the country, as well as on the island of Kyushu, football has been slow to gain popularity in the region between Kyoto and Yamaguchi, on the western tip of Honshu. And without fans, no team can generate enough income to hold on to its best players. By 2002, a lack of talent at all positions, as well as weak coaching and some plain-old bad luck sent Sanfrecce tumbling into the second division.
This was naturally a disappointment for a team that had been one of the top clubs in the original J.League (and indeed, has the longest continuous history of any club in Japan). But Sanfrecce responded positively to this development. The shock of relegation forced the team to clean house and dump a lot of their high-priced players. But while Hiroshima has been slow to build a grassroots fan base, they have done a spectacular job of building their youth programme. By the early 2000s, Sanfrecce Hiroshima Youth was already turning out members of the U-18 national team by the handful, and when the team was relegated in 2002, they managed to persuade all of the young prospects to stay on. The team focused on developing a solid core of youngsters with strong prospects for the future, while going back to basics in their effort to build local fan support.
This focus on youth and quality paid off, as Sanfrecce rebounded to the J1 in just one season. However, despite a lot of positive signs such as a jump in attendances to a 15,000 average in 2003, the team seemed unable to take the next step. The team edged upward in the standings through the 2004 and 2005 seasons, as their younger players began to mature, but the Purple Archers never managed to climb above midtable, and the breif surge in attendances lasted barely a year. By 2006 the average home gate had dropped back to just over 11,000.
When a football team fails to perform, fans and management almost always blame the coach. Similarly, when a club with several obvious advantages fails to develop a competitive team, sports journalists invariably start asking questions about club management. In Sanfrecce's case the team has clearly done some things very well. The development of a powerful youth program, which generates a steady stream of players who get international experience with the Japan U-20 or U-23 teams, is by far the team's greatest achievement. And youth team development is a task that requires good management, forward-thinking leadership and a lot of hard work. Nevertheless, there are a host of other factors to suggest that something is not quite right in the Sanfrecce front office.
The team's failure to build a solid and consistently loyal fan base is obviously the most immediate problem. Because of their weak ticket sales, Sanfrecce still does not have the finances of teams in the eastern half of the country, or even greater Osaka, for that matter. Given the lack of money, and the fact that the team has succumbed to relegation on two separate occasions, it is nothing short of a miracle that Sanfrecce has not seen a much more dramatic exodus of players. It seems that the team has cultivated a great deal of loyalty from the players who came up through the youth system. But there have been a few exceptions, and those exceptions were critical. When Sanfrecce were relegated in 2002, they lost defender Marcus Tulio Tanaka who would go on to become a franchise player with Urawa Reds and a core fixture in the national team. The relegation at the end of the 2007 season, meanwhile, convinced right wing back Yuichi Komano to move on to a J1 club, if only to maintain his spot on the national team.
Sanfrecce has also shown a consistent inability to attract truly effective coaching talent. Takeshi Ono, who held the reins for four seasons in the mid-00s, was probably the most strategically intelligentof the lot. But the former Japan U-20 coach was best at identifying and cultivating youngsters. Although he managed to pack the team with players who saw at least some national team action at the U-20 or U-23 level, he was unable to take the team to the next level. Since Ono's departure the Purple Archers have been led by a series of relatively unimpressive coaches from eastern Europe. After struggling towards midtable in 2004, 2005 and 2006, Sanfrecce suffered another collapse of form in 2007, which seemed to defy explanation. Even as the team was losing critical league matches and dropping the promotion-relagation series to Kyoto Sanga, it managed to run circles around cup opposition and charged all the way to the final of the 2007 Emperor's Cup. The immaturity of key players cannot be overlooked completely, but it is hard to explain this contradictory performance without at least mentioning the coaches and team management.
As was the case in 2002, Sanfrecce responded to relegation in a very positive way. Perhaps there is something about defeat and disaster that brings out the best in Hiroshimans. In any event, the team's J2 attendances rebounded to a level that surpassed all but one previous J1 campaign! The Purple Archers shot the competition to pieces, storming through the 2008 season and securing both a promotion berth and a the J2 title with more than two months left in the season. They finished the campaign with a phenomenal 100 points from 42 matches.
After their impressive play in the J2 last season, there is little question that Sanfrecce have the capacity to be a consistently competitive J1 team, and perhaps even to return to the championship calibre that the team possessed when the league was created. But of course, history has already demonstrated that the team could just as easily flounder around in the bottom half of the table, watch their fans drift away, and set themselves up for another round of relegation and recovery. A lot will depend on how effectively the club can appeal to the fans who turned out in 2008, turning the temporary interest they have shown to a winning club into persistent loyalty over what is likely to be at least a 3-5 year struggle towards true title contention. Sanfrecce definitely has the young talent to develop into a league champion in time. But promise and potential must be turned into concrete results if that is ever to happen.
|
National Team
Overseas Players
