From Japan to Mergellina: the J.League's kits shot in Naples
The jerseys of Kawasaki Frontale, Shonan Bellmare and Sagan Tosu arrive on the Neapolitan seafront
Sports
May 20th, 2021
May 20th, 2021
Photographer
Vincenzo Schioppa
Vincenzo Schioppa
On April 27th J.League presented "20J1 - Played in Japan, Made by the World", a project that celebrates diversity starting from the kits of the 20 teams of the Japanese top flight. The branding activities of the Football League in Japan have literally brought the jerseys around the world: from Bangkok to Barcelona, from Bali to Frankfurt, passing through Hong Kong, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney and New York. The last stop of this incredible tour is Naples, where the jerseys of Kawasaki Frontale - Japanese champion team three times in the last four years - and Shonan Bellmare have landed.
Both Frontale and Bellmare have nautical themes in the iconography of their club, with the dolphin and the trident symbols of the two teams. The local maritime heritage of the clubs was the perfect link with Naples, another reality where the link with the land is one of the touch points that binds football and the city.
On the Naples waterfront, in addition to the Kawasaki and Shonan uniforms, also that of Sagan Tosu has arrived, a club that in recent years has had several ties with Italian football through Juventus, which helped to inaugurate the training ground in 2014.
This project comes at a time when the ties between J.LEAGUE and Italian football - and more generally between Japan and Italy - are getting stronger than ever. In addition to the shirt made by nss that connects Kagoshima to Naples, Cristian Battocchio also plays with Tokushima Vortis, the first Italian in J.League since 2015 - the last was Michele Canini in the ranks of FC Tokyo in the summer of 2014.
