These footballers who owe their mentality and careers to manga
From Messi to Mbappé, from Zidane to Iniesta, an entire generation of football stars grew up watching Captain Tsubasa, Dragon Ball or Naruto. Behind the goals, celebrations, and free kicks, paper heroes shaped flesh-and-blood champions.
April 1981, Tokyo. Yoichi Takahashi publishes the first chapter of Captain Tsubasa in Weekly Shōnen Jump. Forty years later, his characters are still running — but on very real pitches, in bodies named Messi, Iniesta, Torres, or Mbappé. What no one saw coming was that this manga, which sold over 90 million copies, would become one of the most powerful motivational engines ever invented for global football. And it's not alone: Dragon Ball, Naruto, and One Piece took over for subsequent generations. Here's the story of an underground influence — that of manga that built champions.
01Captain Tsubasa, the manga that programmed an entire generation of footballers
When asked why he created Captain Tsubasa in 1981, Yoichi Takahashi simply replied: "I wanted to show people that football was an interesting and fun sport." At the time, Japan didn't even have a professional league. Today, the manga is credited with building Japanese football — but also, more unexpectedly, transforming the football imaginary of Spain, Italy, Brazil, and France.
The series is known by different names depending on the country: Olive and Tom in France, Holly e Benji in Italy, Oliver y Benji or Supercampeones in Spain, Captain Majid in the Middle East. Widely re-broadcast during major international competitions, Captain Tsubasa reached several generations of young players at the exact moment their calling was being formed.
The astounding list
The names who have publicly attributed their passion for football to Captain Tsubasa form a who's who of the game's recent history: Lionel Messi, Zinedine Zidane, Andrés Iniesta, Fernando Torres, Alessandro Del Piero, Kylian Mbappé, Neymar, Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, Alexis Sánchez, Francesco Totti, Hidetoshi Nakata, Lukas Podolski, Julian Draxler, James Rodríguez, David Villa, Iker Casillas… And the list goes on.
“I remember that when I was going to school in Fuentealbilla, before leaving home, I would watch those cartoons. I was always fascinated by Oliver’s character, by his fast shots, by Benji’s saves.” He is now an official ambassador for a Tokyo train station decorated with Tsubasa imagery.
“Everyone at school was talking about this football cartoon from Japan. I started playing football because of it.” He ended his career in Japan, in a discreet homage to the work that launched him.
The Argentinian said he grew up reading the manga. Konami even officially associated him with the character of Tsubasa Ozora in its eFootball game. His coach Luis Enrique already compared him to “Oliver and Benji combined.”
The Frenchman publicly displayed his love for the series, even meeting Yoichi Takahashi in person during the 2022 World Cup. His high-speed dribbles directly recall the manga's aesthetic.
“Captain Tsubasa has always been one of my biggest inspirations since childhood.” The German took his admiration to the extent of ending his career at Vissel Kobe, in Takahashi's home country.
The Manchester United winger has a tattoo on his leg depicting Tsubasa and his teammates. Born in 2004, he belongs to the third generation of players "nurtured" by the manga.
An acknowledged debt, sometimes even tattooed
The phenomenon goes beyond mere inspiration. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang celebrated one of his goals at Camp Nou by performing Goku's Instant Transmission pose.
Antoine Griezmann, after a goal in 2026 against Real Betis, replicated Monkey D. Luffy's Gear 2 stance, publicly declaring: "I'm addicted to One Piece."
And the new generation continues: Lamine Yamal mimics Naruto's jutsu, Roony Bardghji celebrated his first goal for Barcelona by replicating Sasuke Uchiha's Chidori. The circle is complete — Japanese fiction has become the universal grammar of football stars' body language.
02Beyond football: a trans-sport phenomenon
Football doesn't have a monopoly on this influence. In the NBA, star Zion Williamson told GQ that approximately 80% of league players are manga and anime fans — even if few dare to claim it publicly. He himself draws motivation from Naruto, to the point of coming to Comic-Con dressed in a Hokage cloak, and releasing a pair of "ninja-themed" Air Jordans with Nike.
Joel Embiid, NBA MVP, watches Dragon Ball Z to mentally prepare for big games — he was seen in a session before a decisive Game 1 against the Celtics. Jaylen Brown cites Demon Slayer, Death Note, and Seven Deadly Sins. Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns bonded in Minnesota over their shared passion for anime. Daniel Gafford sports tattoos of Vegeta, Goku, and Gohan on his left knee.
The observation is also found in MMA, F1, and tennis: shonen culture, with its narrative arcs built around self-improvement, relentless training, and rivals who push one to become better, seems tailor-made for those who choose an athlete's life. This is no coincidence. It's a measurable psychological mechanism.
03What cognitive psychology teaches us about sport and the influence of manga/TV series
All these testimonies converge on the same intuition: what a child is exposed to during their childhood partly shapes the adult they will become. Far from being a mere poetic statement, this idea is one of the best-established findings in 20th and 21st-century psychology. Four major theoretical frameworks help us understand, scientifically, why a manga can truly create a champion.
Albert Bandura and Social Learning Theory (1961-1977)
Canadian-American psychologist Albert Bandura demonstrated, as early as his famous Bobo Doll experiment (1961) at Stanford, that children learn complex behaviors by observing models — including symbolic models encountered in media. His theory identifies three types of models: the live model (parent, coach), the verbal model (instructions), and the symbolic model, i.e., characters encountered in books, films, series, manga.
His research establishes four conditions for observational learning to occur: attention, retention, motor reproduction, and motivation. Manga — through its narrative intensity, colorful design, and the powerful identification it generates — ticks all four boxes with formidable efficiency. A child absorbed in Captain Tsubasa is not just watching a cartoon: they are encoding models of behavior, effort, and discipline.
Source: Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bandura, Ross & Ross (1961), Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.Carol Dweck and the "growth mindset" (Stanford, 2006)
Psychologist Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford, has demonstrated over decades of studies that children who believe that intelligence and talent develop through effort ("growth mindset") consistently outperform those who believe them to be innate and fixed ("fixed mindset"). In sports, Dweck has shown that the more a player believes their athletic ability results from effort and training rather than natural talent, the better their performance in the following season.
Sports manga like Captain Tsubasa, Slam Dunk, Haikyū!!, Kuroko's Basketball, Ao Ashi, or Blue Lock are open-air schools of the growth mindset: their heroes fail, train, fall, and start again. They embody Dweck's thesis in narrative form. A child who spends their childhood with them almost mechanically integrates the equation effort + attitude = progress.
Source: Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine Books.Green & Brock: when storytelling truly changes the reader (2000)
Researchers Melanie Green and Timothy Brock popularized, in a foundational study published in 2000, the concept of "narrative transportation": when a reader or viewer is fully immersed in a story, they become temporarily more susceptible to its values, beliefs, and role models. Their work, revisited in dozens of meta-analyses since, demonstrates that the more a person is "transported" into a narrative, the more they adopt the attitudes and behaviors it promotes.
Manga, through its intensive reading, the pace of its chapters, and the almost total identification with the hero (the famous character identification highlighted by Hoffner in 1996), is one of the most powerful media in the world for producing this transportation. The child who dreams of being Tsubasa does not just imitate a character: they appropriate an entire system of values — that of joyful effort, surpassing oneself, friendship as a driving force, and refusal to give up.
Source: Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701-721.Wishful identification
Cynthia Hoffner's work on "wishful identification" shows that children don't just like a hero: they actively wish to be like them. This effect is strongest when the character is competent, attractive, and shares common ground with the child (gender, background, age). Tsubasa Ozora, a primary school hero and absolute football fan, thus becomes the ideal projection for millions of children worldwide.
Coupled with "parasocial relationship" — this imaginary but emotionally very real connection a child builds with a character — wishful identification produces a particularly powerful long-term modeling effect when it comes to behaviors repeated over years of childhood.
Source: Hoffner, C. (1996). Children's wishful identification and parasocial interaction with favorite television characters. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 40(3), 389-402.The synthesis: a formidable neurocognitive cocktail
By stacking these four mechanisms — observational learning, growth mindset, narrative transportation, wishful identification — we obtain a psychological cocktail of rare effectiveness. Sports manga does not just entertain: it installs, in the still-plastic brain of a child, mental models that will guide their choices, efforts, and resilience in the face of failure for decades. This does not create talent — Messi would be Messi without Tsubasa — but it creates the mindset that allows talent to express itself.
The Invisible Chain
Forty-five years after Yoichi Takahashi's first stroke of the pen, a kid from Mâcon, Rosario, Bondy, or Fuentealbilla turns on a screen. He watches a paper footballer lift an imaginary cup. Somewhere in his brain, a door opens.
Twenty years later, he's the one lifting the cup.
— END —