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The story
Moments after Chiben Wakayama beat Kendai Takasaki 4–3 to claim their fourth summer Koshien title — and first in five years — Bundesliga giants Borussia Dortmund posted a congratulatory message on social media, setting off a buzz in 5ch’s live-thread community.
Why would a soccer club react to a high school baseball final? Theories flew across the thread, from a shared tiger-stripe uniform connection and rumors of past exchanges between the two clubs, to suspicions that the whole thing was staged.
The final of the 108th National High School Baseball Championship was held on August 22, with Chiben Wakayama (Wakayama) edging out Kendai Takasaki (Gunma) 4–3,
claiming their fourth title and first in five years. After the hard-fought game, a congratulatory message arrived for Chiben Wakayama from an unexpected source, catching fans off guard.
The message to the hard-hitting Chiben squad — now tied with PL Gakuen for four summer titles — came from none other than Borussia Dortmund, a powerhouse of Germany’s top soccer division.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
See you at the WBC, lol (b)
Is there actually some connection between them?
Their connection is the yellow-and-black stripes — Dortmund's tiger mascot kind of looks like Puma's logo.
Apparently that's led to some exchange between the two organizations.
This is probably part of that.
A 'Tigers meets Koshien' kind of link.
Even foreign soccer fanboys (サカ豚, a mocking nickname for soccer fans) can't resist it
It's probably just their Japan social media guy, who happens to be a baseball fanboy (焼き豚, the mocking counterpart term to サカ豚), posting this on his own.
I'm gonna go streak to the convenience store 🙁 (a classic 5ch meme for 'I can't even')
https://imgur.com/n3ElGF4.png
https://imgur.com/dRfUYSZ.png
Soccer fanboys are just liars
The fact that they posted the message just 5 minutes later suggests they were watching via 'Virtual Koshien' (バーチャル高校野球, Japan's official Koshien livestream service).
Baseball's the popular one now
https://note.com/happywomen_jp/n/nd08b8ac7cbce
Meanwhile in Germany it's more like 'baseball, what's that?'
Nobody cares about 'ball-kicking' — everyone plays that everywhere.
Japan's real sports culture is baseball.
Meanwhile high school soccer gets totally ignored lol
Pretty much, yeah — you can watch it if you actually want to.
The world: 'High school baseball rules.'
He'd say things like 'they play almost every single day and it's always packed — just as good as the Bundesliga,' and soccer fans would rip into him for it.
The Bundesliga only plays like twice a month, though.
He also said soccer isn't actually Japan's No. 1 sport, and the soccer fanboys lost it over that one too.
Because most people don't even know it's a thing.
Background and Key Points
Koshien needs little introduction inside Japan but plenty outside it: the National High School Baseball Championship, held at Hanshin Koshien Stadium since 1915, is a two-week, single-elimination tournament that draws roughly 50,000 spectators a game and stops the country the way a World Cup final might elsewhere — this year’s edition was the 108th. Chiben Wakayama’s win gave the school its fourth title, tying it with PL Gakuen, a genuinely significant marker in a competition where most schools never win once. Borussia Dortmund is not a random outsider here: the club’s black-and-yellow “Die Schwarzgelben” branding gets compared by Japanese fans to Puma’s logo and, by extension, to the Hanshin Tigers, and the thread references prior contact between Dortmund and the Tigers organization, plus a visit to Koshien Stadium itself — so the congratulatory post has a real, if thin, institutional thread behind it rather than coming out of nowhere.
What the thread actually disagreed on wasn’t whether the connection was real, but how sincere it was — some read it as an authentic gesture rooted in that tiger-stripe/Hanshin link (or even a staffer’s personal baseball fandom), others assumed it was a low-effort social-media stunt, possibly not even watched live but noticed via Japan’s official “Virtual Koshien” stream, which posters confirmed is accessible from Germany.
What outsiders will likely miss is the sport-rivalry subtext driving half the replies: much of the thread isn’t really about Dortmund at all, but about Japan’s long-running baseball-fan-versus-soccer-fan sniping (焼き豚 vs サカ豚), with Dortmund’s message being used as ammunition in that unrelated domestic argument.
*This article was compiled as an excerpt/summary of the 5ch (Geisports Sokuho+) thread [High School Baseball] Five Minutes After Chiben Wakayama’s Fourth Summer Title in Five Years, German Soccer Powerhouse Dortmund Sends Congratulations.
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