Japanese players' agents are already elite, so that's not why prices stay low

2026-07-29 original Football

I wrote about tactics last time, so this time it’s about the market.

Watching the World Cup, I came away feeling that individual Japanese players are now on par with the world’s top tier. That’s how I see it.

But one thing kept nagging at me the whole time.

The price tags are cheap.

Transfer talk involving Takefusa Kubo or Keito Nakamura never goes smoothly. And even when it does, the fees are relatively low.

Meanwhile, just the other day, Dortmund reportedly agreed to sign Genk’s 18-year-old midfielder Konstantinos Karetsas for a transfer fee of €33 million (roughly $61 million, ¥6.1 billion). In a world where an 18-year-old commands ¥6.1 billion, a young Japanese player who is a “sure thing to succeed” goes for $30 million. What accounts for this gap?

The first thing I suspected was the agents. Reconciling the interests between clubs is an agent’s job, so if that isn’t working, maybe their skills are lacking.

Let me state the conclusion up front. This hypothesis was wrong. What follows is a record of how I investigated the “the agent is the culprit” theory, rejected it, and where it finally clicked into place for me.

When I looked into it, the agents were already first-rate

First, let’s confirm the facts.

Takefusa Kubo’s agent has been Sport360 since May 2025. It’s one of Germany’s most powerful agencies, with Kroos among its shareholders and Nagelsmann and Werner on its roster. Keito Nakamura also moved to a major Paris-based agency in September 2025.

Sport360, through a staff member handling Japanese clients, has rapidly gathered Japanese players over the past year or so — Yuma Suganuma, Ayumu Seko, Koki Ogawa, Kento Shiogai, and even Daichi Kamada after the World Cup. Ko Itakura and Hidemasa Morita are with CAA Base, under the UK’s CAA. Takumi Minamino and Ayase Ueda are with SARCLE, which originated in Japan. Wataru Endo and Hiroki Ito are with Universal Sports Japan.

In other words, the top tier of Japanese players has already completed its move into agencies that belong to Europe’s inner circle. And it was the major European side that led this move. They spotted the business opportunity first and are systematically capturing the Japanese market.

As for how things stand at the very top of Europe’s elite, it turns out they don’t even use agencies. Bellingham’s father (registered as a FIFA-licensed agent), Kane’s brother, Mbappé’s mother’s own company — a player who has become an overwhelming seller no longer needs a network. All he needs is a lawyer and a tax accountant. Representation structure is a function of a player’s market bargaining power.

So the “quality” of agents was never the issue. And yet the gap in price tags remains.

The culprit lies elsewhere.

The true nature of that $61 million is an option price

From here I’ll write in the language of investing. For me, that’s closer to my native tongue.

Karetsas’s $61 million isn’t the present value of his ability. It’s the price of a call option.

Look at the numbers. Karetsas’s 2025-26 season stats are 3 goals and 18 assists across 49 official matches. That’s an excellent record for an 18-year-old midfielder, but it isn’t a “track record” worth $61 million. What Dortmund is buying isn’t the track record — it’s the signal of precocity: debuting in a top league at 16, being at the center of one of Belgium’s strongest clubs at 18. In other words, the upside potential itself.

Two out of three young players like this end up unremarkable. Even so, the pricing holds up because the one who hits it becomes worth two or three times as much. If the expected value works out as a portfolio, you can buy in even when each individual’s win rate is only 30%. It’s exactly venture investing.

By contrast, a 24-year-old Japanese player who is a “sure thing to succeed” is a value stock. The floor is high. But the tail — the upside — is cut off. And the transfer fee market doesn’t pay for the floor. It pays for optionality and remaining runway. Certainty is a discount factor; volatility is a premium factor. That’s the perverse pricing formula this market runs on.

Here an obvious objection arises.

“There are Japanese players who moved to Europe at the same age, at the same unfinished stage. Doan and Ueda were like that too. Nobody was talking about ¥6 billion then.”

That’s true. A gap that can’t be explained by age or maturity still remains. This is the part that made me think hardest.

The market is pricing the “population,” not the individual

The option price for an unproven young player, since the data on the individual is thin, gets estimated from the historical distribution of the population he belongs to.

Behind an 18-year-old Belgian stand realized breakout cases like Doku, De Bruyne, and Hazard. Behind a 19-year-old Brazilian stands Vinícius. Buyers have already observed that “this population sometimes produces $100 million players,” so they can pay a price that bakes in the tail.

So what is the observed maximum for the population called “Japanese players”?

I looked into it and was surprised. The maximum in the European market is Hidetoshi Nakata, from 2001.

Roma to Parma, €28.4 million (roughly ¥3.3 billion). His move a year and a half earlier from Perugia to Roma was €21.7 million, which at the time was the eighth-highest fee in the transfer market. Higher than Henry. In other words, Nakata in 2001 was priced right in the middle of Europe’s top price band.

The problem is that this record has never once been broken in a quarter century.

Shinji Kagawa’s move from Dortmund to Manchester United (2012) actually came in at less than half of Nakata’s fee. Even in recent years, Wataru Endo’s move to Liverpool was €20 million, and Takehiro Tomiyasu’s to Arsenal was just over €20 million — neither reached Nakata’s level. Over these 25 years, global transfer fee levels have inflated 5 to 8 times over. A ceiling that hasn’t even been broken in nominal terms has, in real terms, actually sunk considerably.

The strict all-time nominal number one is actually Shoya Nakajima’s €35 million (2019), but the buyer was Qatar’s Al-Duhail. The roughly $88 million offer for Kaoru Mitoma also came from Al-Nassr. In other words, the only buyers who have offered tail prices for Japanese players are Gulf money, and European buyers don’t include Gulf pricing in their reference class. Europe’s ledger, as far as its last update goes, still stands at 2001.

For a population whose ceiling hasn’t been updated in a quarter century, a rational buyer can’t underwrite a $61 million option. It can’t be underwritten actuarially. And unless a player emerges to break the ceiling, no one will ever price above it. It’s a neat circularity.

Strong circumstantial evidence for this hypothesis comes from South Korea. Despite being the same East Asia, Son Heung-min moved to Tottenham for roughly €30 million in 2015, and Kim Min-jae moved to Bayern for roughly €50 million in 2023 (both figures based on media reports). South Korea has generated two tail events over this quarter century. That’s why the pricing ceiling for young South Korean players sits above that for Japanese players.

What created the gap wasn’t physicality or technique. It was whether a realized case had been entered into the population’s ledger.

Someone has to make the first deal happen. But you can’t ask an individual to do it

Which means there’s only one way to rewrite the price tag on Japanese players. Someone has to make the first “over $61 million” deal happen.

Here I have to talk about Kaoru Mitoma.

This past January, Mitoma received two offers from Al-Nassr worth roughly $88 million. Last May, Germany’s Bild reported that Bayern was considering signing him for up to €45 million. Twice, a deal that could have become the first tail event for a Japanese player actually landed on the table.

But the transfer never happened, and afterward injuries piled up, he missed out on the World Cup, and his contract entered its final year.

I don’t want to be misunderstood — I have no intention of criticizing Mitoma’s decision. Brighton is a good club that plays interesting football, and an environment where playing time is nearly guaranteed is plenty desirable for a player. His choice was rational at each point in time he made it.

The problem lies on the structural side.

When a transfer that breaks the ceiling of a category goes through, the benefit is distributed to “the price tags of every Japanese player thereafter.” It’s a public good. But the risk of failure — getting frozen out at the new club, injury, a shortened career — is borne entirely by the individual who took the chance. Benefit is public, risk is private. Under this asymmetry, it’s rational for an individual to behave conservatively.

In other words, we shouldn’t rely on individual courage to rewrite history.

Create an entity for whom making a tail event happen pays off

So what do we do? I think it’s about creating an entity for whom risk and return sit on the same side. There are three candidates.

First, the selling J.League club.

A club holding a sell-on percentage clause is the only party that profits the more a player gets resold for. Yet currently, Japanese players go to Belgian clubs for $1-3 million and get resold for $10-20 million, with the profit margin landing at the Belgian club. That was the case with Tomiyasu, with Ueda, with Ito.

It’s easier to understand by comparing it with how Karetsas was sold, mentioned at the start. Genk (also the club Junya Ito belongs to) rejected every offer that came in, held out for up to €35 million, drove up a bidding war on the back of interest from Milan and PSG, and ultimately sold him to Dortmund for €33 million. According to reports, the contract even includes a profit-sharing clause should Dortmund resell Karetsas in the future. Selling a homegrown player high, and securing even the upside after the sale — that’s what a pricing mechanism looks like.

Belgium didn’t end up this way by accident. The government changed the law to allow professional contracts at age 15, and even created a tax system that returns part of the income tax on young players acquired from abroad to the club — running a “promising youngster exchange” as national policy. The pricing mechanism already exists, and Japan is currently lending it out to another country.

Second, agents who bet on a category strategy.

Sport360’s collecting of six Japanese players reads this way in this context. If one breaks through the wall, the price tags of the remaining five get rewritten, so investing ahead of time in “the first one” is rational as a portfolio strategy for an agency. Not individual negotiating skill, but whether they can trigger a re-rating of the asset class called “Japanese players.” I think this is where an agent’s real capability gets tested.

Third, a European club with Japanese capital.

This mechanism already exists too. Sint-Truiden, owned by DMM. Tomiyasu, Endo, and Kamada all launched their European careers by going through there. As a landing point for Japanese players entering Europe, I think Sint-Truiden is doing a very good job. That deserves respect.

What I’d like to see, one step further, is a case of Sint-Truiden selling directly to a big club on the first move. Tomiyasu went through Bologna to Arsenal, Endo went through Stuttgart to Liverpool. In both cases, it was the intermediate club that closed the biggest-margin final deal, with Sint-Truiden selling before that point. If this changes to a direct sale, it would become the first mechanism where Japanese capital holds everything from development to a high-value sale, end to end.

Closing

Starting from suspecting the agents, where I landed was this: Japan doesn’t have its own pricing mechanism.

Players’ individual ability has already caught up. What hasn’t caught up is the market-side infrastructure that converts that ability into price. And since this isn’t a matter of talent but a matter of design, it can be fixed.

Just as Kim Min-jae’s €50 million rewrote South Korea’s prior distribution, the moment the first deal goes through, the price tags of everyone after that change. The question is whether that can happen as the consequence of a profitable mechanism, rather than one individual’s reckless courage.

I think it’s a subject worth thinking about while the residual heat from the World Cup is still around.

References

This piece was drafted and directed by Kuzuryu, written by AI.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/07/1721/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.