The popular soccer manga Blue Lock will have a ‘big announcement’ next week on August 18, 2021. This was previously announced on Weekly Shonen Magazine, where the series is serialized. It comes after a lot of hype around the series getting an anime, and it will get both the cover and the lead color page in the 38th issue of the magazine. Let’s remember the short PV they released for the Blue Lock Volume 14 release + 4 million copies commemoration, which looked like anime for a few seconds:
Muneyuki Kaneshiro writes the manga, while Yusuke Nomura is in charge of the illustration. It’s been ongoing since August 2018 and has 14 compilation volumes at the moment. The series won Best Shonen at the 45th Kodansha Manga Awards, an award that was previously won by Tokyo Revengers.
Another fun fact is that the Attack on Titan creator, Hajime Isayama, recommended the Blue Lock manga before his own series had ended! He tweeted that everyone in Japan should definitely read Blue Lock. He also invited the fans to check out the manga after Attack on Titan ends.
Blue Lock
The story begins with Japan’s elimination from the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which prompts the Japanese Football Union to start a program scouting high school players who will begin training in preparation for the 2022 Cup. Isagi Youichi, a forward, receives an invitation to this program soon after his team loses the chance to go to Nationals because he passed to his less-skilled teammate —who missed— without trying to make the game-changing goal by himself.
Their coach will be Ego Jinpachi, who intends to “destroy Japanese loser football” by introducing a radical new training regimen: isolate 300 young strikers in a prison-like institution called “Blue Lock” and put them through rigorous training aimed at creating “the world’s greatest egotist striker.
It seems very likely that the ‘big announcement’ is in fact a Blue Lock anime. However, official confirmation will come on August 18.
Source: Weekly Shonen Magazine Website
© 金城 宗幸 (原著), ノ村 優介 (著) / KODANSHA 講談社
