As Fans Build A Team Of Their Own...Yokohama Readies For The World Cup

For most of his 41 years, Tomio Tsujino was a typical Japanese sports fan. As a kid, he liked baseball. As a young adult, he followed professional wrestling. And when the J. League, Japan's first professional soccer league, started in 1993, he fell in love with soccer. That relationship threatened to end in tears in 1998, when his money-losing team, the Yokohama Flugels, was closed down. So he and other fans took radical action. They created Japan's first-ever people's soccer club, owned and run by members. Tsujino, a failed TV and radio writer, became president. "I am not a natural leader," he explains. "But I was really angry and wanted to do something."

In mid-December, after two years in the minor Japan Football League (JFL), Yokohama FC will be formally admitted to the J. League--albeit J2, the second division. The achievement is remarkable for Japan, where sports and entertainment are, more than elsewhere, top-down affairs: Large corporate sponsors field the teams, and fans' opinions hardly matter.