Tokyo Verdy

Yomiuri Shimbun founded the side on 3 January 1969.

Rui Ramos joined in 1977 and stayed nineteen years. Kazuyoshi Miura arrived in 1990 fresh from Brazil and by 1993 was J.League MVP, part of a Verdy side that felt closer to Yomiuri's baseball team, the Giants, than to a typical football club — dominant, well-resourced, occasionally resented for exactly that. When the J.League launched in 1992, Yomiuri renamed the team Verdy Kawasaki, taking the colour green from the Italian and nodding to Palmeiras and Juventus at once. The club moved its base to Tokyo in 2001 and became Tokyo Verdy 1969, later shortened to Tokyo Verdy in 2006.

The trophies mostly belong to that first stretch: seven league titles between 1983 and 1994, five Emperor's Cups, an Asian Club Championship in 1987. Takayuki Morimoto's record as the youngest goalscorer in J.League history, set at fifteen, sits alongside that history as a reminder of the club's academy pedigree. The rivalry with FC Tokyo, contested as the Tokyo Derby, is what carries the local weight now.

Home matches are played at Ajinomoto Stadium, which holds just under 50,000, a capacity built for an era when Verdy filled far more of it than it does today. The silverware stopped arriving after the mid-2000s, and the club that once operated like a Tokyo institution has spent the years since trying to find its way back into the conversation it used to dominate.