Which Sport Has Inspired the Most Anime and Manga?

One of the best things about anime and manga is the fact that they explore so many different kinds of stories in interesting and unique ways. The medium’s ability to breathe life into all kinds of stories about all kinds of things, and bring viewers into different worlds in which they perhaps would never have taken an interest. It goes without saying that sport and anime have been interconnected for a very long time, and in this current era, we have had the pleasure of watching anime become ubiquitous, and see more athletes and entire sporting codes become more connected with the media of anime and manga.

From basketball to kabaddi (yes, kabaddi), sport in anime has been a constant exploration codified by highly successful, influential titles like Tomorrow’s Joe, Slam Dunk, Captain Tsubasa, Blue Lock and many more, but which sport has been explored the most in anime and manga?

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Setting Up the Field of Play

This Exercise Will Be Restricted to the Top 50 Rated Sport Anime on MAL

There are over 700 identified sports anime titles listed on the anime aggregator site, MyAnimeList, and it would obviously be a huge task to leaf through every single one to see what kind of sport it depicts in its story. However, it could still be very interesting to take the top 50 rated sports anime titles, as well as the 50 with the most fans on the site, and take note of which sport comes up the most. What was expected before the research was conducted was that basketball would have the most associated anime titles, followed by baseball and then football (soccer), but that could be the author’s bias. Sequel seasons or spin-offs will not be counted as individual sports anime. Let’s first identify the top 50 sports anime on MAL:

The order of the ranking here is not the most important piece of information we can glean from the table, but rather, we can do a raw count of the number of times certain sports came up in this Top 50. There is also another way this information could have been presented, with a Top 50 ordered by number of members on MyAnimeList, but for now, we have a general idea of the titles regarded the “best” sports anime. There was an interesting football anime boom in the 2000s, most likely inspired by Japan’s joint hosting of the 2002 FIFA World Cup.

Which Sport Has Inspired the Most Anime?

And the Winner Is…

In the above 50 titles, baseball is the main sporting code depicted in at least 9 of 50 titles, most of which are adaptations of manga titles. Basketball comes up only three times, despite one of those times having been in the case of Slam Dunk, one of the most influential shōnen manga titles of all time, which was one of the main draws of the Golden Age of Weekly Shōnen Jump alongside Dragon Ball and Rurouni Kenshin. Surprisingly, football came up a lot more than basketball, with 7 of 50 titles being concerned with it in some way, but as mentioned previously, this isn’t too surprising concerning the popularity of the sport and the fact that Japan hosted the biggest competition in world football at the turn of the millennium, at the height of the careers of some of the most celebrated athletes the sport has ever seen. Baseball has been a part of Japan since its introduction to the archipelago in 1859, shortly after the cessation of the sakoku lockdown which saw the country seal itself off from international interactions for over 250 years.

The reason for the sport’s dominance in depiction through anime and manga is simply an expression of the fact that it is the most popular sport in Japan. Professional baseball teams first appeared in Japan in the 1920s, with a league being established in the mid-1930s. By 1950, the sport had grown big enough in Japan to feature two leagues: the Central and the Pacific Leagues, together forming what is referred to as National League Baseball (NLB). Japan has seen glory in world baseball a number of times, most recently defeating the United States 3-2 to win the World Baseball Classic in 2023 to make it the third Classic win in the history of Japanese baseball. The national team in Japan is also often regarded the world’s best by the international governing body of baseball and its variants, the World Baseball Softball Confederation. We’ve had anime about ancient boardgames, skating in the future, boxing in the future, various performing arts, football, rock climbing, rugby, badminton and even karuta, but its clear the sport we keep coming home to in the format of anime and manga is baseball, to the point of completely unrelated titles featuring “baseball episodes”.

Ace of Diamond

Release Date

2013 – 2015

Directors

Mitsuyuki Masuhara