# The Account It Sits In Decides How Big It Can Grow — Notes on Investor's Sunday on the J.League and the Business of Japanese Sport Source: Realpha Blog (blog.getrealpha.com) Original article and charts: https://blog.getrealpha.com/en/blog/invsunday-2026-11-08-j/ > Listening notes on Investor's Sunday, 8 November 2026: Yasuhide Okabe, co-representative of the Sports Business Summit, sets the Los Angeles Lakers' reported sale at around 2 trillion yen — roughly 20 times annual revenue — against Red Bull's purchase of Omiya Ardija from NTT at a rumoured 300 million yen, and explains what it costs Japanese corporate-owned clubs to be booked as advertising spend. It also covers why negotiating intelligence, one-year contracts and a thin off-the-pitch talent pool keep the transfer balance in deficit, and flags which figures are only his retelling. Educational discussion of research method, not investment advice; no stock recommendations or price targets. Published: 2026-11-09 Locale: en Tags: Investor's Sunday, J.League, sports business, Yasuhide Okabe, negotiation leverage ![The interior of a large stadium at dusk, the camera looking down a long sweep of seating into the depth of the frame, the nearest rows lit by side light and packed with spectators, the tiers beyond them emptier step by step until the farthest sections sink into shadow](/covers/invsunday-2026-11-08-j-cover.png) > If you do not enter the tiger's den, you do not get the tiger's cub. The only plan left to us is to attack the enemy by night with fire, so that they cannot tell how many we are. > > —— Fan Ye, *Book of the Later Han*, Biography of Ban Chao (Southern Song dynasty, c. 445; my own translation) On the 8 November 2026 episode of Investor's Sunday, hosts Nishida and Morimoto talk with Yasuhide Okabe, co-representative of the Sports Business Summit, about what has to change in the J.League and in Japanese sport as a business. He puts two prices side by side: the Los Angeles Lakers sold for about 2 trillion yen on annual revenue of roughly 100 billion, about 20 times; Red Bull bought Omiya Ardija from NTT for a rumoured 300 million yen. His reading is that Japanese corporate-owned clubs have been booked under advertising spend for decades, so the market prices them without growth — and that fixing it takes people who can run a business, work in English and get inside the European information loop. He says Japan needs a hundred of them. Note that he flagged the 300 million figure himself as a rumour he cannot confirm, and the two Lakers valuations are market talk he is relaying. ## Why is the same business worth 2 trillion in one place and 300 million in another? The difference is which account the buyer is doing the arithmetic in. On the Lakers side, 2 trillion yen against roughly 100 billion of revenue is about 20 times, and Okabe adds that the previous owner had bought in ten months earlier at a 1.5 trillion valuation — 500 billion of paper gain in ten months. That multiple is paying for growth. On the 300 million side, his reading is that the number sits close to net assets: run it for five years, decide it will not work, find no buyer in the market, break the assets up and you still get your 300 million back without a loss. That is a price set by someone who expects no growing stream of earnings at all. ![One extremely tall bar labeled 2 trillion yen stands beside a nearly flat short bar labeled 300 million yen, with a dashed line between them reading “same business,” showing how the same team can be assigned prices thousands of times apart by height.](/figures/invsunday-j-two-prices-en.svg) Why would that be? Okabe's explanation is that large Japanese corporations have balanced these books for years through *mochidashi* — topping the club up out of their own pocket — with the line item sitting in advertising spend. His question is blunt: what advertising return did NTT actually get from owning Omiya? Only people inside that company know, and he doubts it was much. The purpose of that spreadsheet is to cover the shortfall. How large revenue and profit could grow is not on it. What stayed with me is that the players, the stadium and the supporters are the same in both cases. Change the account the thing is booked under and the price moves by a factor of thousands. ![A two-panel comparison: the left panel has a low horizontal ceiling line and a downward subsidy arrow, while the right panel has an upward arrow and a dashed line above labeled “no limit,” showing that different accounting categories have different ceiling heights.](/figures/invsunday-j-account-ceiling-en.svg) ## What do the owners of the clubs that work in Japan have in common? They founded their companies. Okabe points to the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks after Masayoshi Son took over — now, he says, the highest-earning club in Asia — then Rakuten's Mikitani, DeNA's Yokohama, Mercari's purchase of Kashima Antlers, and CyberAgent's Fujita at Machida Zelvia. Machida's ground gets called the castle in the sky, meaning nobody can get there, and they marketed their way to the edge of a J1 title anyway. It is not limited to internet companies. Edion's Kubo in Hiroshima spent thirty years getting Peace Wing built and doubled revenue; Japanet's Akito Takada in Nagasaki put 100 billion yen into a stadium. Okabe spent twenty years at the company behind the Champions League and has walked through every good ground in Europe. He says Nagasaki's holds up — before you even reach the VIP room, the whole pitch is spread out behind the glass. So the common factor is where the decision sits. A founder can decide, and carries the risk and the responsibility. A salaried executive has internal review, budget cycles and groundwork to lay first. Okabe adds a line I think is right: this business is not rocket science, and done properly it makes money. ## Did the Champions League work because it had history behind it? It did not exist before the 1990s. Two marketers invented it in a hotel. The founders of TEAM Marketing came out of ISL, and after they resigned the UEFA president of the day phoned them: I want European football to be a bigger commercial success and the money reinvested in European football, I have the vision and not the method, go and work it out. The two of them drove from Lucerne down to Ticino and shut themselves in a hotel for two weeks. They were not football people. The problem they saw was that Europe had four cup competitions at the time, and Europeans themselves could not say who the real European champion was. So they built a competition where winning makes you the champion, and named it the league of national champions — the basis of marketing being that it registers in an instant. Then they changed the format. Under the old structure every national cup winner came in, Malta's champion against England's champion: fair, and nobody wanted to watch. They allocated places by country ranking so the strong leagues sent more teams and the big clubs came in, and they put the matches in the slot where European broadcast rights and sponsorship were worth most. ![Four identical blank boxes on the left converge along four lines into one large colored block on the right, showing four fragmented cup competitions merged into one event where the winner is the champion.](/figures/invsunday-j-four-into-one-en.svg) Japan already has its own proof. Nippon TV has run the high-school football tournament for decades and it fills the National Stadium with close to 70,000 people. Okabe has taken senior European football people to watch it, and their reaction is: these are high-school kids? That is more than the Bundesliga. University football, which concentrates the best players in the country, is at a higher standard and nobody watches. The difference is whether someone kept telling the story for decades. Koshien and the Ekiden relay grew the same way. He mentions one inversion in the same stretch. The old way of using celebrities was the club paying a lot of money and nobody being able to measure the effect; the new way is the celebrity paying in as a shareholder — he points to Ipswich in England, where Ed Sheeran is one of the minority holders. A shareholder markets the club to protect the value of their own stake, and the club pays nothing. He says Japan has zero of these, and doing it means getting the money in as equity. ![A chart with audience on the horizontal axis and level on the vertical axis, showing a small dot labeled college football in the upper left and a large dot labeled high school football on the right, with a dashed arrow pushing right between them.](/figures/invsunday-j-level-vs-audience-en.svg) That section made me look at a habit of mine. I used to treat a long history as a precondition for anything catching on, and the origin of the Champions League takes that precondition apart. ## Why does Japan keep selling its players cheap? Because it is outside the information loop, and because one-year contracts put all the deadline pressure on its own side. Okabe says that since the J.League opened in 1993 Japan's transfer balance has looked like a trade deficit: expensive foreign players in, Japanese players out cheap. He is specific about where leverage comes from. The first layer is intelligence. What situation is the other side in? Where does this player rank in their squad, do they get used? When does the contract run out? Your firmness means nothing when the other side has ten buyers; it means something else entirely when not selling leaves the player to walk away for free. The second layer is competition, or the appearance of it — in a meeting in Manchester, dropping in that you have just come from Barcelona, without saying who you saw; a café will do. The third layer is the deadline. Whether you know where the other side's deadline falls decides whether you can push the price. Japanese players are mostly on one-year deals, so the contract runs out, they leave for nothing and the club collects no fee. That keeps the club permanently in sell-now mode with its hand showing. The other side has done this three hundred times, this side three or five, across a language barrier. People who can structure a contract case by case and shape it in the club's favour — Okabe says you can count them in Japan on one hand, and in English the count is zero. ![A line chart of transfer fee against time: a solid line gradually declines from a high level, then drops steeply to zero near contract expiry; a short dashed line appears only on the final steep drop, and a gray band on the right is labeled free agent.](/figures/invsunday-j-contract-clock-en.svg) On talent he gives numbers, and an inversion. The plan he wrote applying to Cambridge was that players and coaches would take longer to reach Europe, so the off-the-pitch people should clear the path first. It went the other way. In his first year at the Champions League there was one Japanese player in Europe, Shunsuke Nakamura; last season nine Japanese players appeared in the competition and more than a hundred are in Europe. Off the pitch? Kozuma at City Football Group, McMahon in the UEFA system — that is about as far as the names go. He says winning a World Cup takes a hundred people like him. ## So what can I do with this myself? If, like me, what you buy in the market is shares, three layers carry over. First, ask what a business line counts as inside the company that owns it. When good news lands and the stock falls anyway, one common reason is that nothing moved in the status of that line. Whatever sits under a cost centre has nobody working to grow it, however good the release reads. The Omiya rumour price is that in its extreme form. Second, when a pretty number appears, ask what the other side knows that you do not. Okabe's version of leverage is unsentimental: your firmness means nothing when the buyer has ten sellers to choose from. Retail investors are often the party with the deadline — margin coming due, a stop level, cash needed by month end. Once your deadline is visible, you are no longer setting the price. I have been that party: I sold a position in a hurry a few years ago because of a line on my screen, with nothing happening at the company itself. Third, separate heat from structure. University football is the better standard with nobody watching; high-school football fills the stadium because of decades of media work. Most hot themes in the market also have someone who has been laying the story down for years. Ask three things: who is laying it, for how long, and what happens if they stop. Answer those and you are holding structure. Fail to answer them and treat it as noise for now. ## Where to look yourself - Investor's Sunday, 8 November 2026, with guest Yasuhide Okabe (co-representative, Sports Business Summit), hosted by Nishida and Morimoto - Deloitte's Football Money League across several years, for how European club revenue splits into matchday, broadcast and commercial - UEFA's Club Licensing Benchmarking Report, which carries wage-to-revenue ratios league by league - The J.League's annual club management disclosure, to see how large advertising income sits in the revenue mix - FIFA's annual international transfer report, for where fees flow and which countries run a surplus ## The One Thing to Take Away One idea: the account a thing is booked under decides how big it can grow. Omiya's players, ground and supporters did not change, and booked under advertising spend the price stopped at net assets; the Fukuoka club did not swap out its squad after the owner changed either, but the account became a business, and a dozen years later it is the highest-earning club in Asia. Read the account before you read the number. Something I have tried, and you can do today: take a sheet of paper and write down the three things that took the most of your time this month. Next to each one, write what it counts as in your household's books — a cost, something you are growing, or something you have been quietly topping up with no plan for it to grow. One of the three usually comes out blank. That is the one whose account you get to decide.