The creator of the Japanese football manga "Captain Tsubasa" will finish the series in April, ending a 43-year run in which it captivated children and even professional footballers around the world, including Spanish star Andres Iniesta.
Tokyo publishing house Shueisha Inc. said Friday that Yoichi Takahashi will finish the manga series featuring the character Tsubasa, a football prodigy, in the last issue of Captain Tsubasa Magazine Vol. 20, to be released in early April.
Takahashi, 63, said on the X social media platform that he has a rough idea of how the story of Captain Tsubasa will end, but it could take him 40 more years or longer to realize the ideas in the manga format and he felt it is "unrealistic."
"I am now over 60 years old and my body is certainly feeling the age," he said.
"Due to such decline in physical strength and changes in the drawing environment caused by the recent wave of digitization, my pace of drawing manga has slowed down compared to the past," he said.
Takahashi said he will consider producing more Tsubasa stories on an ongoing basis in a rough storyboard format widely called a "name" in the manga industry.
The first episode of "Captain Tsubasa" was printed in the Shukan Shonen Jump weekly in 1981, 12 years before the country's first professional J-League tournament launched.
In the manga, Tsubasa plays for local clubs in Japan's Shizuoka Prefecture and national youth teams before joining Barcelona FC of Spain, one of the world's most popular clubs.
The Tsubasa series has been adapted for anime and games in more than 50 countries and regions. The anime is known in Arabic-speaking areas as "Captain Majid."
Iniesta, a former Barcelona midfielder, said during an event in Tokyo in 2019 that he saw the TV anime featuring Tsubasa before going to school when he was young and was impressed by the hero's distinctive plays. Iniesta played for the Japanese club Vissel Kobe from 2018 to 2023.
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