Sadao Furunuma’s Coaching Wisdom Reveals the Secret Behind a Team’s Success
Special Interview [Part 1
Six-time National High School Soccer Championship winner and three-time Inter-High champion, he nurtured Japanese national players such as Yasuhito Honda and Koji Nakata and is respected as a mentor by Noritake Kinashi and Machida Zelvia’s coach Tsuyoshi Kuroda.
The team that drew attention in the recent All Japan High School Soccer Tournament was Teikyo (Tokyo), making its 35th appearance in 15 years. They secured a 2-1 victory in the opening match against Kyoto Tachibana (Kyoto), followed by a dominant 5-0 win over Kanazawa Gakuin University High School (Ishikawa) in the second round. Although they were eliminated in the third round after a penalty shootout loss to Meisho Hitachi (Ibaraki), they left a strong impression of their resurgence as a powerhouse.
However, former coach Sadao Furunuma (85), who led Teikyo to a record-tying six postwar championship titles, found their performance unsatisfactory.
“There were good players, and they should have had a method to win the championship. The current coach was my student and served as the captain when Teikyo finished as runner-up in the 1998 tournament (Hiroshi Fujikura), but he still hasn’t experienced true hardships. Even if he has more experience as a player than I did, the number of matches he has watched doesn’t compare to mine. There is always a reason behind becoming the best.”
I was once ridiculed by people who said, “He doesn’t know anything about soccer.”
Today, there is hardly anyone in the high school soccer world who doesn’t know Furunuma, but he originally came from a track and field background. So how did a soccer novice like him achieve such success?
“Teikyo is located in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, near Saitama Prefecture, where soccer is popular in areas like Kawaguchi and Urawa. Many students from these areas were skilled with the ball. I was able to take the team to the High School Championship from my first year as coach, but while we could win in the preliminaries, we would lose in the first or second round at the national level. Strangely, the teams that beat Teikyo often went on to win or finish as runners-up. That made me think, ‘Damn it, I want to win too!’”
He incorporated direct passes and strategies from other sports, such as basketball and handball. Some in the industry mocked him, saying, “That person knows nothing about soccer.” But when he learned that the coaches of powerhouse teams enjoyed drinking, he would visit them with a bottle of sake in hand, requesting practice matches and absorbing their knowledge.
“I often visited coaches like Minoru Nagaike of Fujieda Higashi (Shizuoka), who won the championship four times, and Shu Nishido, who led Narashino (Chiba) to its first title in his fourth year as coach. Since I had never played soccer myself, I had no hesitation in talking to these great coaches, and they, in turn, would generously share their knowledge, saying, ‘You don’t even know that?’”
The training environment was far from ideal, as the team had to share a narrow field with the baseball team, making it uncertain whether they could even secure a full soccer pitch. However, Furunuma turned this disadvantage into an advantage. “Since we couldn’t practice in a full game format, we dedicated 70% of our training to shooting drills,” he explained.
“We practiced shooting from all angles—left, right, front, back, and diagonally. Even if a shot missed, there was a wall right behind the goal, so we didn’t waste time retrieving the ball and could maximize our training efficiency. After winning the national championship, we played practice matches against corporate teams like Furukawa Electric and Hitachi, and they would often praise us, saying, ‘Teikyo players are really good at shooting.'”
Spectacular goals were simply the result of dedicated practice
Teikyo displayed exceptional strength at the National Stadium, where the semifinals and finals of the championship were held, and this was no coincidence. In the 62nd tournament final in 1984, they secured a 1-0 victory over Shimizu Higashi, which featured future Japan national team players such as Kenta Hasegawa (59). Despite being on the defensive, Osamu Maeda (59, former Yokohama F. player) scored a spectacular goal, striking a long cross from the left rear directly into the net—a goal that was the product of dedicated practice.
By aligning the positioning of Teikyo’s goal with the angle of sunlight at the National Stadium, players became accustomed to recognizing the goal’s location without looking directly at it.
“Humans perform best in environments that closely resemble what they are used to.”
From the February 21-28, 2025 issue of “FRIDAY”
Interview and text by： Masao Kurihara PHOTO： Kazuhiko Nakamura
