Article written by guest author Zito Madu.

 

There’s a cliche in soccer that to be a good striker, you often need to be selfish. As the player responsible for scoring goals — the one who trains particularly for the job — the striker has the strongest ability to put the ball back in the net. From my first season playing club soccer to playing in college, and then at the semi-pro and professional levels, coaches drilled that lesson into me. Try to take the shot yourself​​​​​​.

 

That lesson comes with an obvious caveat: The selfishness should be moderated. Instead of always taking the shot, it’s more about the hypothetical that if you’re in a good position and you have a teammate in a good position, choose yourself. If your teammate is open and your angle is difficult, pass the ball.

 

RELATED: Which BLUELOCK Striker Are You Most Like?

 

Ultimately, what’s important isn’t scoring your own goals — it’s winning the match. The BLUELOCK anime kicks off with a focus on that first lesson.

 

From Reasonable to Extreme

 

 

BLUELOCK, from Bandai Namco Filmworks and studio 8bit (That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime), takes the idea of selfishness in soccer to its most extreme. In doing this, BLUELOCK brings the human themes of high-level play to light in a new and more interesting way than other sports anime. 

 

I started BLUELOCK after pausing my watch of another soccer anime, Aoashi. It’s a grounded series, and I moved away from it because its protagonist turned into a defender, a role I found hard to relate to (I had beef with defenders) since I usually played winger or forward. BLUELOCK appealed to my sensibilities as an offensive player, and it starts reasonably, introducing us to protagonist Isagi Yoichi and his dream of becoming a star soccer player.

 

 

At first, Isagi seems to be the least talented of his peers, but he slowly develops into the most powerful of them all. Where Aoashi leaned into its realistic approach, BLUELOCK meets the extreme. Enter Ego Jinpachi, a madman soccer fan whose goal is for Japan to win the World Cup. He addresses the complacency of the current structure of the sport and proposes a solve: develop a world-class striker.

 

Any country would love to have one, but the path toward this isn’t to better fund and reinvigorate the training and culture of the domestic leagues and thus the national team. No, the grand plan is to lock a bunch of kids away in a facility, facing challenges and training only he could devise.

 

Ego leans on that first I mentioned: Above all things, a striker must be egoistic and selfish. Ego names real-life players like Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Robert Lewandowski as examples of the kind of player he wants to create. This concept makes for incredible drama, where each unique game or event means potential ruin for the careers of a young player. Friends are pitted against each other. It’s cruel. But Ego wants to harden them against sentimentality, against the pressures of the world stage and to truly see who has the killer instinct to be the best.

 

The Strongest Survive… Sort Of

 

 

In a way, BLUELOCK is built on a unique reading of the Darwinian concept of “the strongest survive” — rather than the most adaptable. This leads to the thinking that power, ruthlessness and brutality against others is the key to success, rather than the true solution being collaboration, intelligence, and many times, luck. There’s that caveat.

 

Thankfully, this plays into the anime’s inherent comedy. For example, one of the young players notes early on that none of the players Ego describes as ideal has actually won the World Cup (until Messi just last year). His mission seems misguided if these elite strikers who fit his mold can’t achieve the ultimate goal.

 

We also clearly see the importance of focusing on more than just yourself on the field. We see the different weapons of each player and how egoism isn’t consistent between them all. Confidence? Yes. A belief in one’s ability? Yes. While leaning on egoism works for some, it fails for others.

 

 

One of the supposed failures of Isagi, for example, is his habit of passing to players in a better position instead of shooting himself when through on a goal. This habit is positioned as a fatal flaw he has to overcome. In 2018, England fell to Croatia partly because Harry Kane, an elite striker, decided to shoot toward the end of the match instead of passing to Raheem Sterling, who was open in the center of the box.

 

Ronaldo, Neymar and Lewandowski all bowed out of the World Cup to teams who didn’t have elite strikers of the same mold. Messi won, not particularly by being the best forward in the tournament, but by being the best playmaker and having a team around him that was so cohesive and talented, they played as a strong unit rather than for the sake of one superstar. So the lesson of being the star, being selfish, needs to meet the caveat of working with your team.

 

The Perfect Player Isn’t Alone

 

 

Ego never mentions him in the anime, but the player he seems to truly want to create is Erling Haaland, a striker who seems lab-built to do nothing but score goals. And he scores goals to an extreme degree. Often, his touches-per-game are in the tens or twenties, but he’ll finish with a goal, a brace or a hat trick. But of course a striker like Haaland can’t be the ultimate product of the BlueLock program — he scores an absurd amount of goals and yet his national team didn’t make the last World Cup and ultimately needs more than a world-class striker. Haaland would have Japan in the same position as it is now.

 

RELATED: Would You Survive the BLUELOCK Selection?

 

It’s this irony of reasonable extremes and the importance of both selfishness and team awareness that seem to be Ego’s ultimate goal. So while our hero Isagi might eventually become Ego’s presented idea of a striker, it’s clear that Japan can only see its promised World Cup success if that elite player works with the team around him.

 

Just like real life, individual talent and ego have their place, but in bringing them together with a well-rounded team, each with their own selfishness, weapons and skill, BLUELOCK reveals a truth about soccer, that the greatness of one player is ultimately the result of those around them.

 

 

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Zito Madu is a creative and writer living in Brooklyn. His work can be seen in GQ, Plough Quarterly, The New Republic and The Washington Post.