Team Data: Vissel Kobe
Team Name:
Team Logo & Mascot:  
Team Flag:
Home Uniform Away Uniform
 
Home StadiumKobe Wing Stadium
Seats 42,000 (WC 2002 venue)Kobe Universiade Stadium
Seats 60,000
Team Data:
|
Management Corporation: | Vissel Kobe Co., Ltd. | |
Established: | 30 June 1994
| |
President: | Haruo Nakano
| |
Investors: | Crimson Group Co., Ltd | |
Address: | Kotonoo Bldg., 1-5-9
Kotonoo-cho, Chuo-ku,
Kobe City, Hyogo 651-0094 | |
Hometown Area: | Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture | |
Home Stadium(s): | Kobe Universiade Memorial Stadium (capacity: 60,000)
Kobe Wing Stadium (capacity: 56,000) | |
Joined J. League: | 1997 |
|
 |
 |
 | Moovi
As we discuss in the main text of this page, the decision by a well-known ham manufacturer to choose a cow as its team mascot was a bit odd. However, Kobe beef does have a strong nationwide reuptation for quality, and there are plenty of cattle farmers in the countryside surrounding the city. "Moovi", as he was dubbed, suffered an image makeover along with the rest of the team's logo marks, when the Crimson Group bought the team. Call us old fashioned, but we still prefer the black & white version.
| |
 |
|
What can one say about Vissel Kobe. The team has been trying to "redefine" itself for so long that nobody is really sure what it was about in the first place. First of all, let's take the name. Vissel Kobe's roots lie in the Ito Ham soccer club, which was never a particularly great club team, but performed well enough to earn promotion to the J.League at the end of 1996. With much fanfare, the team announced its new name: Vissel!
Naturally, the response of nearly everyone in the footballing community was: "What the heck is a vissel?" Perhaps the team was choosing a yiddish word to describe what fans do after the opposing team scores a goal? No, the team explained, "Vissel" is a combination of the words "victory" and "vessel". This was a ship that was going to carry Kobe to victory. When the fans got over their initial surprise, the team announced its mascot. Since the main sponsor company was a packer of ham products, naturally, the team chose as its mascot . . . . . . a cow.
The reader should be getting the picture by now. Vissel Kobe has never been quite sure what it was all about. This is not to say that Kobe is a bad team. On the contrary, in the early years of the league they were viewed as a tough opponent, whiuch frequently upset top contenders. However, the club invariably seems to end the season near the bottom end of the table. Vissel was promoted to the J.League's first division in 1997, but it has never finished among the top 10 clubs in the professional league. However, until last year, the team was also able to stay out of regulation danger. But that one saving grace is no longer applicable.
Vissel Kobe was originally formed in 1994, as "Kobe Orange Soccer Club" (dont even ASK what the "orange" is supposed to mean), with the support of the Kobe city government and seven corporate backers, including Daiei Inc. and Itoham Foods Inc. . In 1998, Kobe decided that it should make an effort to appeal to the many ethnic Koreans in the Kobe-Osaka area, as one potential fan base. To do so, it began to lure top Korean players. While several good players did indeed serve time in Kobe, the team did a poor job of pitching itself to Koreans, in the way S-Pulse, for example, has cultivated support from ethnic Brazilians in the Shimizu area. After just a year or so of this charade, the Koreans were all shipped off and the team forgot about its desire to be the Korean-flavoured delicacy of the J.League.
The club suffered a major blow when its main corporate sponsor Daiei pulled out of the club's management in 1995. Daiei, the supermarket conglomerate, was hard hit by the Great Hanshin Earthquake earlier that year, and needed all its dwindling funds to reconstruct its own operations. After Daiei's pullout, the city government invested 70 million yen to refinance the company. In addition to its initial investment, the city government also loaned Vissel Kobe a total of about 1.5 billion yen at low interest rates, without collateral, between 1997 and 2003.
Beginning in 2001, the team's "strategy" seemed to take another turn, this time focusing on former national team players that were down on their luck. Kobe went out of its way to sign Kazu Miura, who was one of Japan's finest football players in his heyday, but had reached a low point in his career due to a combination of age and arrogance. Another addition early in the year was Shigeyoshi Mochizuki, whose resume includes the winning goal in Japan's 2000 Asian Cup championship match, but also features a record of firing and censure by Nagoya Grampus, after Mochizuki and two other players defied the authority of then-coach Joao Carlos. Vissel later picked up former Reds speedster Masayuki Okano, who could never match his sprinter's pace with much scoring ability, as well as former national team midfielder Takashi Hirano and striker Shoji Jo, both of whom were once viewed as "golden boys", but who have since fallen so far out of favour that many regard them as washed up.
But despite laying out a lot of money to pack their roster with has-beens, this turned out to be yet another dead end. As the team continued to sign "big" names who were no longer at the top of their game, financial problems began to mount even as the team slipped into the low end of the league table. At the end of the 2003 season, the team suddenly announced to a shocked local fan base that they were bankrupt, and would have to sell the team off to the highest bidder!
While the shock of this near-collapse was felt throughout the J.League, and particularly in Kobe, many felt that it was a blessing in disguise, when the Crimson Group (a consulting firm which owns the Internet shopping mall "Rakuten Ichiba") made the winning (and indeed, the only) bid. The owner of the Crimson Group, Mr. Hiroshi Mikitani, was a local boy who was determined to keep the club in Kobe, and promised to reach into his deep pockets to build the team into a contender. Within days of taking over control, the new owners were already tossing around names such as "Baggio" and "Rivaldo" as they discussed their ideas of what to do with the team.
But in many ways, the Crimson Group's takeover was just another dead-end excursion for this wayward club. Vissel had a roster packed with players whose egos far outstripped their abilities, and the initial efforts to sign "top stars" were extremely misguided. While it is easy to criticise player acquisitions with 20:20 hindsight, the fact is that many of the "big name" players that Vissel purchased in 2004 and 2005 were known to be risky acquisitions long before they arrived Kobe. Ilhan Mansiz had suffered what everyone in Europe viewed as a career-ending injury, but it took six months before Vissel realised they had bought daamaged goods. Patrick Mboma had spent a year in Tokyo (with Verdy) proving that he was over the hill, yet Vissel spend almost two years trying to turn back the clock. Tomoyuki Hirase had already outlived his early "golden boy" image and was being described openly as "the scoreless wonder" two or even three years before Vissel bought him from the Kashima Antlers (a move that was celebrated with drunken revelry in Kashima).
As is usually the case, whether in business or in football, you can only make so many dumb mistakes before eventually they catch up to you. For Vissel, the price they finally paid for one too many blunders was demotion to the second division, at the end of a hapless season in 2005. The demotion will surely come as a slap in the face for Mr. Mikitani, who has indeed spent from his own pockets to try to build the team. But a slap in the face may be exactly what he needs. As his comments to the sports press make clear, Mr. Mikitani knows virtually nothing about football, and if he hopes to achieve success, he will need to do two things that are often difficult for a rich, self-made man to do: (1) Select a team executive who is talented and independent, and NOT a close friend; and (2) Stay out of his way, and restrain the impulse to take part in player selection or team development.
So far, the Crimson Group have not applied these common-sense principles to running the team, and therefore Mr. Mikitani has only himself to blame for the poor results. The team did manage to regain a J1 spot, but only by the skin of its teeth, and no thanks to the team management. The comments that Mr. Mikitani made both prior to his purchase of the club and after Kobe's relegation suggested that he was willing to spend his own money in order to turn Vissel into a winner. He has yet to fulfill that promise, and it is no surprise that fans in Kobe are starting to feel like Tom Cruise in the movie "Jerry McGuire". Before long, the most popular cheer at Wing Stadium is likely to be: "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" .
|
