Rarity Showdown Pits Startup Founders Against Soccer Players

The other day, I came across a comment from the executive of a listed company. He said something like, “Among the X thousand listed companies, someone with a background like mine getting listed is rare.”

That’s genuinely a remarkable achievement on its own. I respect him as a manager.

But wait a second.

If we’re talking about rarity, becoming a J.League player — or, more so, making the Japan national team — is orders of magnitude harder in terms of odds. People say “X thousand listed companies,” but there are only 1,500 J.League players in all of Japan.

Sure, business is a field where people from all over the world compete, and the pool of people who seriously pursued soccer is small. But almost nobody is aiming for an IPO or executive leadership in business either, so in terms of how small the denominator is, there’s not much difference.

I got too curious not to check the numbers. I burned through a lot of tokens, but the results were interesting, so I want to share them.

First, simply count the achievers

Let me lay it out roughly.

There you go — fewer J.League players.

Even adding up more than 100 years of Japanese soccer history, all-time national team players only reach this scale. It’s only a fraction of the current number of listed companies.

Right here is where I’d like to claim victory, but thinking about it more carefully, this comparison is pretty crude. The “denominators” for the two groups aren’t aligned at all. We need to remeasure fairly.

Aligning the denominator to “people who seriously aimed for it”

In both business and soccer, the entry point itself is surprisingly loose.

If we set the entry point for business as “founding a company,” Japan sees roughly 150,000 new corporate registrations per year, and roughly 200,000 people start businesses annually including sole proprietors.

If we set the entry point for soccer as “joining the soccer club in high school,” the Japan Football Association’s Category 2 registered players number roughly 150,000 per grade year.

The orders of magnitude are almost identical. A century-defining discovery (lol).

It’s a coincidence, but it’s still satisfying that they line up this closely.

From here, let’s align a pool that has gone through one more level of selection.

On the business side, “entrepreneurs who reached funding” number roughly 2,700 companies per year, about 1.5% of new corporate registrations. On the soccer side, “players belonging to elite high schools or J-club youth teams,” combining the top teams across the 24 teams of the Premier League and the 9 regional divisions of the Prince League, comes to roughly 1,500 per grade year — about 1% of Category 2 registered players.

The pass-through rates are quite close. 1.5% for business, 1% for soccer.

In other words, “entrepreneurs who secured funding” and “high schoolers belonging to elite schools or J-youth teams” are structurally equivalent. The person who pulled in $1 million from a VC and a third-year student at Aomori Yamada are nearly on par. It feels a bit rude to put them side by side, but that’s what the numbers say.

Pro contracts and IPOs, Prime Market and J1

Starting from here, the tiers above line up symmetrically too.

Pro contracts correspond to IPOs, but the next tier up is even more interesting. Companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market number roughly 1,500, about 39% of all listed companies. J1 players number roughly 500 (20 clubs × 25 players), about 33% of all active J.League players.

The Prime Market ratio and the J1 ratio are almost identical.

Something stirs inside me. Have I stumbled onto a universal structure underlying the nature of selection itself, rather than mere coincidence? (Probably coincidence.)

What corresponds to the national team

Active national team players number roughly 30 per year, about 2% of all J.League players (1,500). Applying the same selection rate to listed companies: 2% of 4,000 = about 80 companies. This is roughly the level of companies with a market cap over $6.7 billion or revenue over $6.7 billion. This number has naturally been increasing in recent years. The count of players playing in overseas leagues should really be added here, but I’ll omit it for convenience.

In other words, the national team = founders of companies with a market cap over $6.7 billion.

Mitoma and Kubo = Akio Toyoda and Takemitsu Takizaki (founder of Keyence).

Laid out this way, it’s brutal all over again. When a business-side listed-company president says it’s “rare among 4,000 listed companies,” in soccer terms that’s the level of saying “a rare career among 1,500 J.League players.” That’s impressive. Genuinely impressive. But what Mitoma and Kubo are looking at is an entirely different view.

Putting it all into a map

Consolidating everything so far into one table looks like this.

Rarity isn’t a one-dimensional question of impressive-or-not. Which tier of rarity is the issue. In soccer terms, “playing well in J1” and “being called up to the national team” are separated by several tiers. Likewise, “went public” and “built a company worth over $6.7 billion” are as different as the national team and a J1 player.

Laying it out this way, I notice that the business side of this conversation tends to get talked about sloppily. In soccer, the tiers are explicit, so nobody gets it wrong. Nobody tells someone who says “I play in J3” that “you’re basically like Messi.” Business, on the other hand, lumps “went public,” “built a unicorn,” and “ended at seed stage” all together under the single word “entrepreneur.” There’s barely any information in that.

The difficulty of being involved as a mentor

From here, a slightly more serious note.

I myself serve as a director, advisor, or consultant at several companies, and lately I’ve had more opportunities to interact with young entrepreneurs as an accompany runner for NEDO as well.

Here, I sometimes feel a certain difficulty.

A subtle mismatch arises around perceptions of achievement level. There’s the gap between where the person themselves believes they currently stand and where a third party sees them standing. There’s also the gap between how much weight the mentor believes their own career carries and how much weight the other person sees in it. Mismatches occur in both directions.

Saying it head-on — “no, you’re still in the early stages” or “no, you’re really not that impressive yet” — doesn’t land well. It comes across as preachy, and it leaves both people feeling bad. In most cases, it just provokes pushback.

What works instead is translating things into soccer’s tier structure. A shared map lets both the other person and yourself stay calm.

For example, where on this map do things like “was selected for a Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry accelerator program” or “won an award at a student business competition” fall?

Programs that select around 100 people each year, or competition winners, are indeed chosen from among applicants. But that applicant pool, in soccer terms, is limited to something like “kids who belong to their junior high soccer club and have made it to the district tournament or beyond.” And the selection criteria isn’t “current track record” but “future potential visible on the pitch or in the business plan.”

This is quite close to an MVP at a junior high prefectural tournament, in soccer terms. It’s certainly an achievement worth being proud of, being chosen among others. But at this stage it’s still unknown whether they’ll even make it into an elite high school, and there are many tiers left before a pro contract.

There are occasionally young people here who mistakenly believe “I’ve already arrived.” Reframe it as “getting cocky over being junior high MVP,” and the absurdity becomes clear.

Frankly, I did this myself when I was young. My career involved planning new business ventures at a large company, leading product development, and shipping multiple products to market. During that time, there was a period when I talked as if I understood that “I am someone who has accomplished something.” Looking back now, it’s rather absurd.

There’s also a structure in the opposite direction. For example, “an entrepreneur who reached funding but then stalled” is, in soccer terms, at the level of “a former pro who got some playing time in J2 for a few years but never made it to J1.” For a young person at the level of junior high prefectural MVP to dismiss that as “nothing to learn from” is structurally, clearly wrong. Even without meaning to, this can show through in attitude.

Between people without a shared map, these mismatches are hard to see.

The map is, after all, only a map

One last thing.

The map built here is nothing more than a tool for gauging the order of magnitude of rarity. Trying to apply it to a specific individual will always produce some mismatch somewhere. A person’s career is multidimensional, including technical domain, industry, region, era, and elements of luck. Framing like “you’re the Player X type” usually leaves a sense of discomfort, for the person themselves and for others alike.

Still, without a map, it’s easy to fall into either a crude one-dimensional judgment of “impressive or not impressive,” or a kind of thought-stopping belief that “I’m special, so ordinary scales don’t apply to me.”

When talking about rarity, pause for a beat and consider which tier of rarity is actually being discussed. That alone considerably raises the resolution of how you see achievements, both your own and others’.

I started this as a joke, but I feel like I ended up with a surprisingly useful map.

This piece was conceived and directed by Kuzuryu, with the writing done by AI.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/05/1598/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.