Tokushima Vortis

Kyoto Sanga stood between Tokushima and the top flight in the 2013 promotion play-off. Tokushima won it.

The club that went up had spent most of its life as something else entirely: a works team, formed in 1955 by the pharmaceutical firm Otsuka and carrying the company name for four decades. It won the Shikoku Football League four times before most of its current supporters were born, and it was still Otsuka Pharmaceutical when it took the Japan Football League title in 2003 and again in 2004, the second of those opening the door to J2.

The renaming came in 1997. Vortis is drawn from the Italian vortice — a whirlpool — and points to the Naruto Strait. The home ground sits in Naruto itself. Pocari Sweat Stadium, opened in May 1971, holds 17,924.

2020 was the club's fullest season. Tokushima won J2 outright rather than through the play-offs, and reached the semi-finals of the Emperor's Cup in the same year.

Blue and orange remain the colours. What the trophy room still lacks is anything from the top of the Japanese game: no J1 title, no J.League Cup, and no Emperor's Cup, the 2020 semi-final being the nearest approach to the last of those.