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The story
Japan national team forward Ayase Ueda (28), currently with Feyenoord, will transfer to French Ligue 1 powerhouse Lille, French outlet L’Équipe and Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported on the 30th. The transfer fee is reportedly around ¥2.8 billion, marking Ueda’s first move into one of Europe’s ‘Big Five’ leagues after working his way up through Kashima Antlers, Cercle Brugge, and Feyenoord. On the forum, opinions were split over whether Lille can really be called a step up from Feyenoord, with posters weighing the pecking order among French clubs like Monaco, Marseille, and the financially troubled Lyon. Talk also spread to where Ao Tanaka might land, and to the fact that this summer saw the highest-ever number of Japanese players in the Big Five leagues.
Sports Nippon
[August 31, 2026, 03:26]
Japan national team forward Ayase Ueda (28) of Eredivisie side Feyenoord will transfer to French Ligue 1 powerhouse Lille, leading French and Dutch media including L’Équipe and De Telegraaf reported on the 30th.
Source: sponichi.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Guess that's thanks to Jiménez, who got cut loose by Milan.
Is Lille actually a bigger club than Feyenoord right now?
Curious where they'd rank on a global scale.
If he ends up as Ligue 1's top scorer…
He turned down Everton's €20-23 million bid, and this is what he gets instead lol
If he can't play Champions League, it's actually a downgrade.
Needed at least Monaco or Marseille level for this to count.
They're stronger than Marseille right now.
The Dutch league ranks below the J.League. This isn't just a small step.
However long this trend keeps up, if you're not at some Premier League club right now, it's rough being taken seriously as a player.
And you have to deliver results immediately too — no matter how big the fee, you'll get axed fast if you don't.
Maybe he limited himself to clubs that play Champions League.
He's 28, so that mindset makes total sense.
Lyon's on the verge of going under.
Before oil money flowed into Paris, Marseille, Monaco, and Lyon were always the bigger clubs.
Since the 2000s, Lille's quietly been in the elite bracket — they made the Champions League round of 16 last year.
That money goes to Feyenoord, not him…
though maybe you're joking.
That's a mean question…
What matters is how much actually lands in his own pocket.
What matters is that he's locked in a Big Five league move.
According to one report, his salary jumped 1.5x to about ¥310 million.
2019-2022 (Kashima Antlers): roughly ¥4.6M-¥30M
2022-2023 (Cercle Brugge): roughly ¥55M-¥70M (about €400K-500K)
2023-present (Feyenoord): roughly ¥160M-¥200M (about €1M-1.2M)
Kashima gets about 2% of the transfer fee as a solidarity payment, so it's a nice bit of payback to his old club.
He's fallen out of the plans and is dropping to the second division — got a problem with that? lol
According to the news, Wao (Tanaka) is out of the club's plans, but no club has actually come calling yet.
Names like second-division Hannover and Birmingham have come up.
The number of Japanese players in the Big Five leagues just hit an all-time high.
So what if it's a Japanese all-time record?
The number of transfers is also an all-time high.
This summer alone set the record for the most transfers in a single year.
Better to be spread across leagues.
There's no one in Italy though.
In baseball terms, it's like just shuttling between Triple-A and Double-A.
That's why the sport stays weak here no matter how much time passes —
can't even win a first-round World Cup knockout match.
Background and Talking Points
Untangling the transfer fee: the money that actually lands in Ueda’s own pocket isn’t the transfer fee itself but his salary, so the point raised in posts #62 and #109 — that ‘the fee and his own earnings are separate things’ — is a distinction that tends to get misunderstood every time a move like this happens. Also, the payout to a player’s youth-development club (FIFA’s solidarity contribution mechanism, capped at 5% of the transfer fee) is a real system, so post #130’s mention of a payback to Kashima isn’t off base. Where the thread split was over whether the move from Feyenoord to Lille counts as a ‘step up,’ with posters citing Champions League experience, league standing, and the trajectory of his transfer fees side by side as yardsticks — though each of those is only a partial measure, something the article text alone doesn’t fully convey. It’s also worth noting that while Ligue 1 tends to be seen as a one-club league dominated by PSG, clubs like Monaco, Marseille, and Lyon have all had their financial ups and downs, so it’s worth being wary of the simple assumption that ‘a strong league automatically means a step up.’
*This article is compiled as an excerpt/summary of the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News Express+) thread “[Soccer] Feyenoord’s Ayase Ueda to move to French powerhouse Lille, transfer fee about ¥2.8 billion, reported by L’Équipe and other outlets.”
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