If you’re a football and video games fan, you’ll no doubt have all sorts of fond memories of the two coming together on a team jersey, from Arsenal’s classic Dreamcast jersey to Fiorentina’s kits in the ’90s. As iconic as these kits were, they were just a few dots on the radar compared to Nintendo’s decades-long sponsorship of a team closer to home.
The history of football in Japan is a little different than most other major markets. Where Europeans have been playing professionally for over 100 years and in South America for almost as long, Japan did not have a full-time league until 1992, when the J-League was formed to revitalize support for a domestic game that had steadily declined in the 1980s.
With big names imported from overseas and quality boosted by local players, the J-League quickly grew into big business and over the next four years the competition looked to expand beyond its initial ten-club roster by featuring a number of teams from around the world J-League added Japan Soccer League, a semi-professional competition that ran from 1965 until the J-League was formed had was the top division of Japanese football.
In 1996, one of the two clubs promoted from this semi-professional league was from Kyoto. Originally formed as Kyoto Shiko Club in 1922, they were an oddity for the time as they were one of the few teams that existed solely as a football team and not as part of a large corporation.
However, this humble background had its downsides as they could not compete financially with bigger clubs who could afford better players and larger facilities and such Kyoto Shiko spent most of their time struggling further down the football pyramid in competitions like the Kansai League (which they’ve won four times) and playing against regional teams and varsity teams.
That all changed in 1993, however, when a huge injection of local sponsorship money – lured by the success and growing profile of the J-League – transformed the club. They changed their name to Kyoto Purple Sanga, players became full-time professionals and joined the Japan Soccer League.
(At the same time, a breakaway group, angered by the sudden shift and committed to remaining amateurs, formed a brand new club called Kyoto BAMB 1993. Then, five years later, a group split from it them and started other called team, even more confusing Kyoto Shiko Club).
This cash injection involved contributions from local government, but was run by two international companies also based in Kyoto. One was industrial and electronics giant Kyocera, which pledged $7.5 million, and the other was Nintendo, which spent $2.3 million (both huge sums for the time). The renamed club became part of an operating company called Kyocera Purple Sanga Corporation, in which Kyocera owns 55% and Nintendo 16%.
The transformation had immediate results. In 1995 the team finished runners-up in the Japan Soccer League (ahead of corporate teams from Honda and Toshiba and future J-League mates Vissel Kobe and FC Tokyo), which promoted them to the J-League where they would spend their first season in 1996 the country’s new top division.
What followed was… not quite as successful. The team – which dropped the “Purple” in 2007 to be more simply known as “Kyoto Sanga” – has spent much of the past few decades bouncing back and forth between the first and second divisions of the J-League, their most notable achievement (besides keeping that). J-League record for promotions and relegations) in 2002 when they won the club’s first – and so far only – major silver prize, the Emperor’s Cup, which is basically the Japanese version of the FA Cup. Note that their first goal of that final was a 2-1 win via Kashima Antlers, was scored by future Manchester United superstar Park Ji-sung, who scored 11 goals in 76 games for Kyoto Sanga between 2000 and 2003.
One thing that has However, support from Nintendo has remained consistent over the years. The company name has appeared on the back of Sanga’s jerseys (above the player number, see above) every year since 1993, in a most interesting way; Instead of using their famous “oval” logo that we see on their games and consoles, perhaps in a nod to their own and Sanga’s long ties to the local community, Nintendo instead uses their original 19th-century kanji logo, which many means fans outside of Japan don’t even know about the connections between the two.
Collaborations between the two are also, as one would expect given their partnership, incredibly common. Nintendo regularly hosts sponsored events with Kyoto Sanga fans and has done so for decades, with the website for an event in 2002 where fans could come to a game, meet Mario and win copies of it Super Mario Sunshine-somehow still online.
You can see Mario’s face above the entrance to the club’s training ground, which Nintendo directly sponsors:
Nintendo is also a regular feature on the cover of Kyoto Sanga’s annual yearbook, with recent seasons featuring Mario and splatoon Characters wearing the team’s purple jerseys (and some very Pretty splatoon-thematic boots):
The 2021 yearbook tried something different and mocked a Kyoto Sanga x animal crossing Scene that managed to involve the club’s mascots, the mythical birds Pursa and Kotono-chan:
Nintendo will even offer the team support in the newspapers, most recently in 2021 when they were promoted back to the top division of Japanese football for the first time in 11 seasons after a long run in J2, the second division. After promotion was secured, a spokesman told Sankei Shimbun, “Nintendo is behind you, just like it is on your uniforms.”
Looking to the future, things are not looking up for the club, but they are at least a bit more stable. While they have yet to win any major trophies since triumphing in the Emperor’s Cup in 2002, Sanga managed to avoid relegation last season (albeit through the skin of their collective teeth) to maintain their status in the top flight and made it to the semi-finals of the Emperor’s Cup, the furthest run since 2011 when they lost finalists.
You can perhaps attribute at least some of that stability to the club finally having a home of their own. The cash injections from Kyocera and Nintendo in the ’90s couldn’t make up for the fact that the team played for decades on an athletics field built in 1942. Since 2020, however, they have been playing in their own new stadium – a real modern soccer field called Sanga Stadium By Kyocera, which seats 21,000 and looks extremely cool.
That’s enough for this introductory guide to Kyoto Sanga (and Japanese soccer and the J-League)! If you want to keep track of what the team is up to in the future – theirs The first game of the upcoming season is very soon, on February 18th-you can Check out their website herewhile the J-League as a whole – a very Underrated league to check out if available in your area – has a good international website Here.