Hajime Moriyasu

Hajime Moriyasu was born on August 23, 1968 in Nagasaki, played his entire club career either at or out of Sanfrecce Hiroshima, and has now been the Japan head coach since July 2018 — making this his second World Cup cycle in the role and his longest sustained period of authority in Japanese football history. He is 57, soft-spoken, and runs a regimen that prizes shape, discipline and pre-rehearsed pattern over individual freedom. The players call him a tactician’s tactician.

As a player he was an unspectacular defensive midfielder who won 35 caps for Japan and represented his country at the 1992 AFC Asian Cup. The 14 years at Sanfrecce gave him both the club’s institutional knowledge and the relationships that would later define his coaching career. He was Mihailo Petrović’s assistant at Sanfrecce from 2004 to 2011 and inherited the head job in 2012; he immediately won the J1 League title, then defended it in 2013, then won a third with the same squad in 2015. He left in 2017 after a slow start, was named the U-23 / Olympic head coach, and then in 2018 took the senior job — the unusual ascent of a coach who has only ever worked inside the Japanese football system.

His 2022 World Cup in Qatar made his reputation. Japan beat Germany 2-1 and Spain 2-1 in the same group stage, became the only team to do that, and then lost on penalties to Croatia in the Round of 16. The signature pattern — concede the ball, defend the box deeply, then break vertically through three or four passes at maximum speed — is now the textbook approach for outsized opponents at the World Cup. The 3-4-2-1 he uses against top opposition is his trademark shape; against weaker teams he goes to a 4-2-3-1 and asks his full-backs to push aggressively.

The May 2026 squad announcement was complicated by Mitoma’s injury, which removed his most reliable 1v1 winger and forced a shift in attacking design. Moriyasu opted against an emergency call-up and instead reshaped the front line around Kubo cutting inside from the right. The selection of Tomiyasu — barely a club regular for two years — and three goalkeepers without major-league pedigree drew some criticism. But the spine of the side is solid (Suzuki, Itakura, Ito, Endo, Kubo, Doan, Ueda), the team is rested, and Moriyasu has been preparing for the Netherlands opener since the draw was made in December 2025. A Round of 16 result is the floor; a quarter-final is the upside that would redefine Japanese football and likely earn him a contract extension that nobody saw coming three years ago.