Japanese Players Are Cheap, and the Agents Aren't to Blame

2026-07-29 original Football

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

Watching the World Cup, I felt that individual Japanese players are already on par with the world’s top tier. That’s my view.

But one thing kept bothering me the whole time.

The price tags are cheap.

Transfer talk for Takefusa Kubo and Keito Nakamura never seems to move smoothly. And even when it does move, the fees are relatively low.

Meanwhile, it was reported just recently that Dortmund had agreed to sign 18-year-old Genk midfielder Konstantinos Karetsas for a transfer fee of €33 million (about $22 million). In a world where a price like that gets attached to an 18-year-old, a young Japanese player at the “he’s definitely going to succeed” level goes for $20 million. What explains this mismatch?

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 capability is lacking.

Let me state the conclusion up front. This hypothesis was wrong. This piece is a record of how I investigated the “the agent is the culprit” theory, rejected it, and where I ultimately landed.

When I looked into it, the agents were already world-class

First, let’s check 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 among its clients. Keito Nakamura also moved to a major Paris-based agency in September 2025.

Sport360, working through Japanese-speaking staff as the point of contact, has rapidly assembled a roster of Japanese players over roughly the past year — Yu Sugawara, Ayumu Seko, Koki Ogawa, Kento Shiogai, and even, after the World Cup, Daichi Kamada. Ko Itakura and Hidemasa Morita are with CAA Base, under the UK’s CAA. Takumi Minamino and Ayase Ueda are with SARCLE, a Japan-founded agency. Wataru Endo and Hiroki Ito are with Universal Sports Japan.

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

At the very top of Europe’s elite, representation isn’t even handled by agencies anymore. Bellingham is represented by his father (registered as a FIFA-licensed agent), Kane by his brother, Mbappé by a company his mother set up herself. Once a player becomes an overwhelming seller, he no longer needs a network. All he needs is a lawyer and an accountant. Representation structure is a function of a player’s market bargaining power.

So the “quality” of agents wasn’t the issue after all. And yet the price gap remained.

The real culprit lies elsewhere.

The $22 million figure is really the price of an option

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

Karetsas’s $22 million fee is not 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. Excellent numbers for an 18-year-old midfielder, but not $22 million worth of “track record.” What Dortmund is buying isn’t a track record — it’s the signal of precocity: making his top-flight debut at 16, being central to one of Belgium’s strongest clubs at 18. That signal is the possibility of a breakout itself.

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

By contrast, a 24-year-old Japanese player who is “certain to perform” is a value stock. The floor (downside) is high. But the tail (upside) is capped. And the transfer market doesn’t pay for the floor. It pays for dispersion and remaining runway. Certainty is a discount factor, volatility is a premium factor. That’s the inverted pricing formula this market runs on.

Here an obvious objection arises.

“There are Japanese players who moved within Europe at the same age, at the same unfinished stage. Doan was like that, so was Ueda. Nobody was talking about $22 million then.”

True. A gap remains that can’t be explained by age or by level of development. This is the part that made me think hardest.

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

For an unproven young player, since there’s little data on the player himself, the price of the option gets estimated from the historical distribution of the population he belongs to.

Behind an 18-year-old Belgian stands the realized examples of huge breakouts: Doku, De Bruyne, Hazard. Behind a 19-year-old Brazilian stands Vinícius. Buyers have already observed that “this population occasionally produces $100 million-plus players,” so they can pay a price that prices in the tail.

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

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

From Roma to Parma, €28.4 million (about $22 million at the time). A year and a half earlier, his move 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 bracket.

The problem is that this record hasn’t been broken once in a quarter century.

Shinji Kagawa’s move from Dortmund to Manchester United (2012) was actually 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 reaches Nakata’s level. Over these 25 years, the global transfer market has inflated 5 to 8 times over in nominal terms. A ceiling that hasn’t even been broken in nominal terms has, in real terms, sunk considerably.

Strictly speaking, the all-time nominal number one is Shoya Nakajima’s €35 million (2019), but the buyer was Qatar’s Al-Duhail. The roughly $88 million fee floated for Kaoru Mitoma came from Al-Nassr. In other words, the only buyers who have ever offered tail-level 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 the top entry goes, is still stuck at 2001.

For a population whose ceiling hasn’t been updated in a quarter century, a rational buyer cannot underwrite a $22 million option. It can’t be justified actuarially. And unless a player emerges who breaks the ceiling, no price above that ceiling will ever be offered to anyone. A clean circularity.

Strong circumstantial evidence for this hypothesis comes from South Korea. Same East Asia, yet Son Heung-min moved to Tottenham for around €30 million in 2015, and Kim Min-jae moved to Bayern for around €50 million in 2023 (both figures per media reports). South Korea has produced two tail events in this same quarter century. That’s why the pricing ceiling for young South Korean players sits higher than for Japanese players.

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

Someone has to close the first deal. 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 close the first “$22 million-plus” deal.

Here I have to talk about Kaoru Mitoma.

Mitoma received two offers from Al-Nassr this past January, worth about $88 million. Germany’s Bild reported that last May, Bayern had considered a bid of up to €45 million. A deal that could have become Japan’s first tail event was actually on the table, twice.

But the transfer didn’t happen, and after that, injuries piled up, he missed the World Cup, and his contract entered its final year.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here — I have no intention of criticizing Mitoma’s decision. Brighton is a good club that plays interesting football, and an environment with near-guaranteed playing time is plenty desirable for a player. His choices were rational at each point in time when he made them.

The problem lies on the structural side.

When a transfer breaks a category’s ceiling, the benefit gets distributed across “the price tags of every Japanese player who comes after.” 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. Benefits are public, risk is private. Under this asymmetry, it’s rational for an individual to act conservatively.

In other words, rewriting history can’t be left to individual courage.

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

So what’s the answer? I think it’s creating an entity where 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 is the only party that profits the more expensively a player is resold later. But right now, Japanese players move to Belgian clubs for $700,000 to $2 million, get resold for $7 million to $13 million, and the margin lands with the Belgian club. That’s what happened with Tomiyasu, with Ueda, with Ito.

It’s easy to see by comparing it with how Karetsas was sold. Genk (also the club where Junya Ito plays) rejected every offer that came in, demanded up to €35 million, drove a bidding process using interest from Milan and PSG as leverage, and finally sold to Dortmund for €33 million. And according to reports, the contract even includes a profit-sharing clause in case Dortmund resells Karetsas in the future. Sell your homegrown talent high, and secure the future upside even 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 “young prospect exchange” as national policy. The pricing mechanism already exists, and Japan is currently the one lending it out to other countries.

Second, agencies that run a category strategy.

Sport360’s move to sign up six Japanese players at once can be read in this light. If one of them breaks through the wall, the price tags of the remaining five get rewritten, so investing up front in “the first one” makes sense as a portfolio play for the agency. Can they pull off a re-rating of the “Japanese player” asset class, rather than just individual negotiating skill? I think this is where an agency’s real capability is put to the test.

Third, a European club under Japanese ownership.

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

What I’d like to see, one step further, is a case where Sint-Truiden sells directly to a big club in one move. Tomiyasu went to Arsenal via Bologna, Endo went to Liverpool via Stuttgart. In both cases, it was the intermediate club that closed the final, biggest-margin deal, and Sint-Truiden sold before that point. If that shifts to direct sales, it becomes the first mechanism where Japanese capital holds the entire chain, from development through to a high-value sale, end to end.

Closing

I started out suspecting the agents, and ended up landing on the idea that Japan has no pricing mechanism of its own.

The players’ individual ability has already caught up. What hasn’t caught up is the market-side infrastructure that converts that ability into a price. And since this is a design problem, not a talent problem, it can be fixed.

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

While the World Cup afterglow is still around, I think it’s a subject worth thinking about.

References

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

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