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The story
The men’s soccer final of the Asian Games Aichi-Nagoya 2026 kicks off at 7:30 PM on the 3rd at Toyota Stadium, with the U-21 Japan national team taking on the U-23 Korea national team for Japan’s first gold medal in 16 years. The match will be broadcast live nationwide on the TBS network, with Yoichiro Kakitani and Kazunari Ninomiya among those scheduled to appear. On 5ch threads, discussion centered on Korea’s determination to field a full-strength squad in pursuit of the military service exemption granted to gold medalists, contrasted with Japan’s tournament-rule position of prioritizing U-21 players to build up its squad for the Los Angeles Olympics two years from now. The threads also touched on why Kakitani keeps getting tapped as a commentator across multiple networks, along with questions about the Japan Football Association’s player development policy.
The men’s soccer final of the Asian Games Aichi-Nagoya 2026 will be held at Toyota Stadium starting at 7:30 PM on Saturday the 3rd. The U-21 Japan national team will face the U-23 Korea national team in a “Japan-Korea clash” for Japan’s first gold medal in 16 years.
Under head coach Go Oiwa, the U-21 Japan team swept all three group-stage matches, beat the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) 1-0 in the quarterfinals, and then defeated Uzbekistan after extra time and a penalty shootout in the semifinals to reach the final.
This highly anticipated match will be broadcast live nationwide on the TBS network starting at 7:00 PM on Saturday the 3rd, with simultaneous streaming on TVer and a live stream also planned on U-NEXT. The commentary team for the final has not been announced as of this writing, but according to TBS’s official site, the following lineup is scheduled to appear.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
TBS
Fuji TV
They're using Kakitani way too much lol
Adding to that lol
Kirin Cup Final: Japan vs. New Zealand
TV Asahi broadcasting live nationwide!
[Navigator] Jiei Kawahira
[Commentary] Yasutaro Matsuki, Atsuto Uchida
[Pitch-side commentary] Yoichiro Kakitani
[Guest] Yuka Kageyama
[Play-by-play] Hiroki Yamazaki (TV Asahi announcer)
[Interviews] Shinji Yoshino (TV Asahi announcer)
[Hosting] Tsumugi Mitani (TV Asahi announcer)
Re: #4
Why Kakitani gets used so much
914 Anonymous[] 2026/10/02 (Fri) 16:22:45.43
Yesterday's two TBS soccer commentators 📺
Masahiro Fukuda's commentary: "Unlike Tanimura, Ueda can really hold the ball up, can't he~"
Yoichiro Kakitani's commentary: "They're different types, you know — Ueda's good at bringing down long balls,
while Tanimura's better at through balls and crosses finished within two touches. Would've been nice if they'd created more of those chances in the first half."
Korea's coming in desperate for the military exemption, and on top of that their squad is just flat-out stronger than Japan's on paper.
Plus Japan went all the way through extra time and only gets one day of rest, so the fatigue probably hasn't worn off either — Korea's three-peat is basically a lock.
All that's left is seeing how well Japan can defend against this Korea side and turn it into something useful going forward.
and Korea's U-23?
U-23 plus 3 overage players
I just want them to at least take it to penalties.
His acting, though… yeah, well.
He's into baseball, huh.
The video view counts are wildly different too — that one's done for.
And that's "yakyuu" (a mocking term for baseball) for you, even in a Japan-Korea match…
Nadeshiko (Japan's women's soccer team) hit 1.1 million views in 11 hours,
while yakyuu got 640k in 5 days.
Without the forced-hype squad propping it up, the real popularity shows through, huh (lol)
BTS contributed that much to the country and still went off to do their military service.
It's ridiculous that athletes get an exemption just for winning something in sports.
BTS fans are going off right now lol
Just give up and go do your service already lol
True, BTS went and did their service,
so it is weird that a soccer title nobody around them is even taking seriously gets you out of it.
Wonder when the "yakiton" guys (another derogatory nickname for baseball players, lit. "grilled pork") are even playing their game.
Honestly it's boring if they don't land the military exemption, since the gap with Japan just keeps widening otherwise.
But I'll admit, part of me also wants to see Korea cry their eyes out in defeat.
But I don't think it's great to have this kind of unevenness in development across generations.
What happens if, out of bad luck, several generations in a row end up missing out on the exemption?
Korea has never once lost to Japan in a match where the military exemption was on the line.
It's a brutal thing to say, but there's a small part of me that wants to see what it looks like the first time that exemption slips away from them (lol)
Because the moment they lose is the exact same moment it's confirmed they're heading into the military, right?
There's nothing crueler than that.
Basically, if Japan went full-strength it wouldn't even be a contest, so the thinking is "just let the U-21s handle this one."
The tournament regulation is U-23 plus 3 overage players.
Korea's going all out with a full squad up to the regulation limit, chasing the military exemption that comes with gold.
Japan's using U-21s to build toward the LA Olympics two years from now, and since players like Goto and the senior national team regulars are being prioritized elsewhere, it's not even Japan's full U-21 lineup.
This tournament is fundamentally an under-23 event to begin with, so most teams are just following the rules as written.
That said, teams like Japan, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia that are competing with under-21 squads are also treating this tournament as a tune-up for next year's LA Olympics Asian qualifiers, with next year's Los Angeles Games in mind.
He's done commercials, so he's got name recognition.
It's all for the ratings.
Even within the U-21 category, this is basically second-string level.
Last time, priority went to other overseas training trips, and the core players — including the domestic-based ones — weren't called up at all.
This time, aside from the overseas-based players and the injured, it's basically the first-string lineup.
I mean, of course — clubs don't release their important players for a tournament like this.
They don't want them getting injured.
It's actually pretty rare that Kosugi made it.
Fukuda's harsh, but the thing is, Ueda himself could barely hold the ball up against Ecuador's tough center-backs either, so that criticism doesn't really hold up.
Even that Uruguay match where he's supposedly played well — that was after their starting defender who'd been containing Maeda got subbed off.
Put one in a picture-in-picture box and switch the main screen depending on what's happening,
like what DAZN and those services sometimes do.
I mean, now that we're on digital terrestrial broadcasting, multi-channel is possible, so they could show both matches live at once.
The damn commercial networks just don't do it out of consideration for their sponsors.
Having Shiogai provoke them could've gotten someone sent off.
The Asian Games has no mandatory call-up power, so if a club refuses to release a player, that's the end of it.
That's why those players can be called up for the senior national team on official FIFA match days but not for this.
The overseas-based players who do get called up for the Asian Games are guys who barely get match time at their clubs — they're not treated as key players there.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
South Korea grants military service exemptions to gold medalists at international competitions like the Olympics and Asian Games, and this time too, the U-23 Korea national team is fielding a full-strength squad built around its Olympic-generation players. Japan, by contrast, isn’t using the overage slots permitted by tournament rules and is instead competing with a U-21-centered squad aimed at building up the generation for the Los Angeles Olympics two years from now — meaning the two countries’ reasons for entering the tournament are fundamentally different, as the thread explained. Where opinion split was over how to weigh this “difference in seriousness”: some argued Japan should take advantage of Korea’s desperation over the exemption, while others raised concerns about development opportunities being unevenly distributed across generations. The thread also floated the view that Yoichiro Kakitani keeps getting picked as a commentator across multiple networks mainly for the ratings boost, given his name recognition and history of TV commercial appearances. The difference between the U-21 and U-23-plus-overage tournament regulations isn’t obvious from the article text alone and is worth keeping in mind to avoid confusion.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Soccer] U-21 Japan National Team Clashes with Korea for the Asian Games Title! Live Nationwide Tonight on TBS… Yoichiro Kakitani, Kazunari Ninomiya and Others Scheduled to Appear.”
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