Underdog Stories / Football history

What happened to Tokyo Verdy, Japan's first J.League champions?

What happened to Tokyo Verdy? The first J.League champions lost their owner, fell to J2 for 15 years and came back on a penalty in the 96th minute.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · July 27, 2026

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On December 2, 2023, Tokyo Verdy were losing 1-0 to Shimizu S-Pulse and running out of afternoon. A crowd of 53,264, dressed in green and orange, filled the stadium. Verdy had spent 15 years outside the top flight. The clock showed 90 minutes, and then it kept going.

So what happened to Tokyo Verdy? Their owner, Nippon Television, walked away in 2009. The club had no money and no clear identity, and it spent 15 seasons in the second division. Itsuki Someno's penalty in the 6th minute of stoppage time finally got them out.

Chris Horwedel, host of Why We Love This Club, calls it "one of the strangest exiles in football." He's right. It's worth going back to see how they got there.

How did Yomiuri FC become Verdy Kawasaki?

The club started on October 1, 1969, as Yomiuri Football Club. Matsutaro Shoriki, the man who founded the baseball Giants, launched it. The Yomiuri empire also owned a huge newspaper and Nippon Television. Horwedel's point is that the plan was never to be a small local side. Yomiuri wanted football to become what the Giants were in baseball, a national show.

It climbed fast. Yomiuri joined the second division of the Japan Soccer League in 1972 and reached the first division in 1978. The 1987 Asian Club Championship followed. The squad had Ruy Ramos, a Brazilian-born midfielder who became a Japanese citizen, and Kazuyoshi Miura, "King Kazu," the first real football celebrity the country had.

When the J.League launched in 1993, the club became Verdy Kawasaki. The name comes from verde, green. One account says the colour was picked as a nod to Palmeiras, the club admired by early Yomiuri idol George Yonashiro.

Who won the first J.League title?

Verdy did, and then they won the second one too. The league opened on May 15, 1993, with Verdy losing 2-1 to Yokohama Marinos in front of 59,626 people. That was a bad start for a club about to dominate.

The championship final against Kashima Antlers was played over two legs, on January 9 and 16, 1994. Verdy won 3-1 on aggregate. The episode has the legs the other way round, with Kashima taking the first. The league's own records say Verdy won the first leg 2-0. They also won in 1994. Add the last two Yomiuri league titles from 1990-91 and 1991-92 and that made four straight and seven in all.

Why did Verdy Kawasaki lose their fans?

The J.League was built on hometowns. Verdy were built on television. Yomiuri wanted to be "Japan's team," like the Giants, and the club neglected its local fans while chasing a nationwide audience.

Football fans turned out to behave differently from baseball fans. Verdy drew plenty of visitors in the early years, but the number of real fans was small. Horwedel makes the same point. Kashima and Shimizu grew deep local followings. Verdy had stars and a TV network.

Then the stars got older, the economy cooled and the first-boom crowds went elsewhere. The 1996 Emperor's Cup was the last big title of the decade.

Why did Tokyo Verdy leave Kawasaki, and who is FC Tokyo?

“The club may have been built from above, the community that stayed after the money disappeared was real.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

In 2001 the club moved to Chofu, in western Tokyo, and took the name Tokyo Verdy 1969. The logic was simple. Tokyo had the people and the media. The trouble was that Tokyo was already home to a J1 club, FC Tokyo. FC Tokyo had been promoted in 2000 and had already collected many of the supporters Verdy were hoping to attract.

The episode adds a nasty detail. When the new stadium opened in 2001, FC Tokyo won the first match there. Verdy's old rivals were the Yokohama clubs. Now they shared a ground with the club that had taken their new city, and the Tokyo Derby became an argument about who belonged. FC Tokyo fans saw a corporate transplant. Verdy fans pointed to the identity they had carried through every name and home.

What happened to Tokyo Verdy after Nippon TV left?

The decline was messy. Verdy won the Emperor's Cup on January 1, 2005, beating Jubilo Iwata 2-1 with ten men on the pitch. They were relegated that same year, finishing 17th of 18. Ruy Ramos came back as manager and got them up in 2007. A 21-year-old Hulk scored 37 league goals, according to the episode. The club went down again in 2008.

Then the money stopped. On September 17, 2009, Nippon TV said it would hand the club to a new holding company, ending 40 years of direct Yomiuri and NTV financial support. The J.League made the move conditional on finding a new sponsor by November 16, or the club might not play in J2 in 2010. In October 2010 Verdy signed a five-year deal with the sports retailer Xebio.

The club survived. It stayed in the second division for 15 seasons, 2009 to 2023. In 2018 they won two playoff games and lost the final 2-0 to Jubilo Iwata. By then the title years looked like another century.

How did Tokyo Verdy get back to J1 in 2023?

The man in charge was Hiroshi Jofuku, who took over in June 2022. He was a former FC Tokyo manager and knew people would ask why he was coaching the green team. His answer, reported by a Japanese football blogger, was that "this club has this history" and that it was up to the people there to make it a positive.

Verdy finished third in J2. Hikaru Nakahara and Koki Morita scored first-half goals to beat JEF United Chiba in the playoff semi-final. The episode calls that game a draw. The league's records show a 2-1 win. The final was at the National Stadium. A draw would do, because Verdy had finished higher in the table.

They almost didn't get one. Morita was given a handball just after the hour, and Thiago Santana put Shimizu ahead from the spot. Late on, Someno was fouled. He took the penalty himself and scored. The episode spells his name "Samino," but the J.League spells it Someno. Shimizu had been four minutes from promotion. Nobody had a star-filled team that day. It was a young side built under tight money.

What is Tokyo Verdy like now?

They came back and did well. Verdy finished 6th in their first J1 season, and their attendance grew faster than any other J1 club's. The derby returned too. In April 2024 Verdy led FC Tokyo 2-0 and conceded in stoppage time. Later that year FC Tokyo won 2-0 at Ajinomoto Stadium.

The academy kept the club going. Takayuki Morimoto debuted at 15 years and 10 months in 2004, the youngest in club history. The women's team, Nippon TV Tokyo Verdy Beleza, is the only Japanese women's club never to have been relegated. A blogger says many of the players who won promotion in 2023 came through the academy.

Horwedel's closing argument is that the supporters who stayed made the difference. Some of the flags in the stands still refer to the Yomiuri days and 1969. People came through Kawasaki, Tokyo and 15 years of J2. Nobody paid them to. That is hard to square with the old line that Verdy are just a corporate brand.

There's one more detail. Someno was on loan from Kashima Antlers. Kashima were the team Verdy beat in the first J.League final.