About the plan to split the season into two and have “six-month” champions who will vie with an “overall champion” in a complicated post season jamboree to increase revenue.

It’s an exceptionally bad idea, the kind of which could only have been dreamed up or approved by people like Mr Mitsuru Murai who have come into football from a completely different culture midway through their careers.

Having a “first stage” and “second stage” will leave the team winning the “first stage” demotivated for the second half of the season and ruin the spectacle for their fans.

It will also take away the magic of the Emperor’s Cup. One of the reasons football is so popular is because we can enjoy sudden death in the cup tournaments and the long hard slog of the league at the same time.

What is the Emperor’s Cup for if the league also ends in a knock-out style tournament? For that matter, what is the league for if it ends in a knockout tournament? This blatant disregard for the traditions of football will harm Japan’s standing in the international football community, no?

Sure post-season works for sports without a separate cup competition, like the NFL, but even them you don’t see them arbitrarily slicing in the year into two halves.

The new system will also discourage talented foreign players from coming to Japan – who wants to have on their CV a Mickey Mouse system which is not accepted elsewhere in the world?

The two-stage system will be a great step backwards. It is ironic that a Japanese league is proposing a system that violates the natural cycle of the calendar and the seasons.

From
JAG, in Luton, UK