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With the FIFA World Cup currently going on, the hype around the Blue Lock manga and anime is at an all-time high, as in just two weeks, the manga sales have increased by two million copies worldwide. Unfortunately, for Team Japan, their World Cup run ended with their penalty shoot-out loss against Croatia as both teams failed to produce a winning goal till the very end.
While the world was shocked by Japan's poor performance during the penalty shoot-outs, this fate was already foretold by Ego Jinpachi of Blue Lock as he had predicted that as long as Japan failed to produce an egoistic striker, they would never go past the second week of the FIFA World Cup, which usually starts with the quarter-finals.
Blue Lock's Ego Jinpachi foretold Japan's fate during their World Cup run
While it is an outstanding feat that Japan has never failed to qualify for the FIFA World Cup in the last 24 years, they have also never been able to go past the Round of 16, always losing by small margins, either by one goal or penalty shoot-outs.
According to Blue Lock's Ego Jinpachi, this lackluster performance by the country is due to the lack of a world-class striker the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Eric Cantona.
As noted by Chigiri, while these forwards have also never won the World Cup, they are egoistic players who at their time knew how to reproduce their goals using their special abilities and be the best players on the pitch.
If one were to observe the forwards selected in Japan's team sheet for the FIFA World Cup, it is easy to deduce that there is no player nearly at the level of the players who have been mentioned above.
This year, Japan selected six forwards for the World Cup, namely Daizen Maeda, Takefusa Kubo, Ayase Ueda, Takuma Asano, Junya Ito, and Kaoru Mitoma. Out of this, Ayase Ueda was the only forward who is truly a striker, while other forwards' primary position was as wingers for their clubs.
This truly displays the level of the Japanese national team, as they failed to produce multiple world-class strikers before the World Cup even began.
This is the exact problem Ego Jinpachi wants to eliminate with the Blue Lock Project. As part of the project, he has gathered 300 best under-18 forwards from all over Japan through his biased picks. His goal is to produce the best striker in the world, and he believes that he will be successful in doing so through the Blue Project he devised with Anri Teieri.
He did give props to the Japanese national team's teamwork and effectiveness as they could be one of the world's better teams in a total team concept. However, the rules of football don't award the victory to the team which shows better effectiveness as a group, but to the team that scores the most goals, which is where Ego Jinpachi wants to work towards a change.
He wants to create a striker who is the world's biggest egoist, who is more than willing to try and score the goal himself, even while there could be a better chance to score if the player passes the ball to his teammate. This is the exact situation which occurred with the series' protagonist Yoichi Isagi, as he chose to pass the ball and thus, failed to help his team qualify for the nationals.
This is how the story begins and how Isagi and the other players choose to be part of the Blue Lock Project.
