Winter 2022 First Impressions – Futsal Boys!!!!!

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Mixed Media Project (including a smartphone game and live-action matches).

Episode Summary: Haru Yamato couldn’t have cared less about Futsal, until he happened to catch a bit of the U-18 world cup in which Tennouji, a player from Japan, pulled out one of his special moves. Now remaking himself in Tennouji’s image (or at least getting into the sport) has become a goal of Yamato’s. On his way to his high school entrance ceremony, a seemingly-ill-fated shortcut brings him face-to-face (though upside-down) with Seiichiro Sakaki, whose Futsal skill is definitely top-tier. The two successfully use the game to dissuade some bullies from picking on a group of kids.

But Sakaki is a bit of a one-man show, and therein lies the issue; though he and Yamato want to join the Futsal club at their school and find themselves in a pickup game fending off bullies once again, it’s clear to the more experienced team members that his lack of willingness to work together with others may become an issue. Can Yamato’s youthful spirit and willingness to have fun possibly break through Sakaki’s hard, selfish shell?

Impressions: So who here has heard of Futsal before? I’m sure the answer is probably more people than I would expect, but I haven’t. According to my very quick and limited research, it’s a variation on soccer/football that’s usually played on a smaller, hard court and typically indoors. That seems like it would be a fun, fast-paced game to enjoy in real-life, but as much as I enjoy sports anime in theory, I feel like this episode didn’t do much to get me excited about either the sport in general or the character relationships, a key component of these series’ appeal.

The show seems to assume some audience familiarity with the sport, which is fine; I don’t blame a story for deciding not to spoon feed me details right off the bat. In fact, I appreciate that there are no real “well, as you know…” style pauses in the dialog to convey information. There are several context clues that provide some info about the game’s rules – body blows and grabbing people are fouls, naturally, and there are various specialty positions that players can occupy. The point of the game is to score more goals that the opponents. If you’re passingly familiar with soccer, as I am (hey, even though I’m an American, I still try), the things that the players do will feel familiar enough that the details don’t quite matter.

But I can’t help but be thrust unwillingly back to my college days, where a friend and I were casually watching The Prince of Tennis via fansub during the dark ages when people in the US didn’t like sports anime for some reason. It was an episode somewhere in the 130’s where one of the characters (likely the protagonist, Ryoma Echizen, though I generally don’t recall) used a whole slew of the opponent’s special moves against them, one after the other. In my memory, most of the episode was comprised of special moves, and it was at that point that I gave up on the show. Why, you ask? Because while I generally enjoy sports anime, the caveat is that I’m not really a fan of what I’d call “Sports Ball Z,” anime series where the focus tends toward over-the-top special moves and their accompanying animation. Within the first minute or so of the series, we see Tennouji perform just such a special move, and from that point I had a difficult time engaging properly with this episode (In fact, it took me several attempts to finish it). Once the action is no longer mostly grounded in reality and starts to feel like a tournament arc from a shounen anime I’m not interested in, it’s an uphill battle for me to want to keep watching.

The character interactions are a bit too by-the-book and the conflicts are already feeling manufactured. I can’t say that this is an auspicious start.

Pros: I’m always happy when a show I’m watching introduces me to something new, whether that’s a new cultural practice, craft, or sport. Futsal is new to me, and while I’m not sure I’m immediately going to seek out some televised matches (I’m not sure how possible that is where I am, though we do have a lot of sports channels in our cable package…), but I’m always happy to learn some things.

Cons: There are elements of this episode that come across as very cynical, or perhaps simply calculating, as far as cultivating fandom interest goes. In one of the early scenes, Yamato goes spilling down a staircase on his bicycle, flipping and flying over Sakaki’s head in slow-motion. As he does, he reaches out for Sakaki’s hand and their fingers barely touch. Now, far be it from me to try to quash shipping in a sports anime – in my opinion, it’s a fun fan activity that simply comes with the territory. But I feel like it’s something that ought to happen organically, rather than being directly manipulated within the show itself by some very choice and seemingly purposeful framing. These are the types of scenes I enjoy watching when the characters have already been established and I’ve started to care about them, not in the within the first moments of the first episode. It’s a tough balance to strike, to be sure, but we fans know what we’re looking at.

Content Warnings: Bullying (mild and cartoonish).

Would I Watch More? – The last sports anime I finished was Backflip!!, and part of the reason why I enjoyed it was because it felt like a lot of care had been put into its construction in addition to the way it introduced a new-ish sport with its narrative. Futsal Boys!!!!!, despite its many exclamation points, feels very rote in it execution, and I’m not sure if I have the time or energy for that.