Vissel Kobe

The club began somewhere else entirely. It was a works team, Kawasaki Steel Soccer Club, founded in 1966 and based in Kurashiki, in Okayama Prefecture. The move to Kobe came in 1995, and with it the name: Vissel, made from "victory" and "vessel", for a port city. Two years later it joined the J.League.

Then, in December 2003, the club filed for bankruptcy. The Crimson Group, parent of the online merchant Rakuten, took it over the following month, and Rakuten bought the team directly a decade later. The colours changed with the first of those owners: the black and white stripes went, and crimson came in, with navy and gold as accents.

Rakuten's money later brought Andrés Iniesta to Kobe, and he stayed five years, from 2018 to 2023 — long enough to be there for the Emperor's Cup won in 2019, the club's first major trophy, and to leave in the season the first league title was won. David Villa and Lukas Podolski passed through in the same stretch; Michael Laudrup had come much earlier, for a single season in 1996, when the club had only just arrived in the city.

Home is Noevir Stadium Kobe, capacity 30,132.

The fixture that matters most is against Gamba Osaka.