How a provincial Belgian club became Japan's talent factory

On Tuesday night at Wembley, seven members of Japan’s 27-man squad to face England will carry the stamp of a town better known for apples than elite sport. Sint-Truiden, population 40,000, sits amid the orchards of Limburg, yet the modest Belgian club has quietly become the most prolific Japanese talent factory in European football.

Since internet giant DMM.com bought the club in 2016, 29 Japanese players have arrived at Stayen; 26 have started matches and their combined appearances already exceed 1,100. The conveyor belt began with Takehiro Tomiyasu, Wataru Endo and Daichi Kamada, all signed in the winter of 2017-18. Eight years later the same trio anchor Japan’s spine: Tomiyasu at Ajax, Endo captaining Liverpool, Kamada pulling strings for Crystal Palace.

Chief executive Takayuki Tateishi mapped the strategy over coffee with national-team boss Hajime Moriyasu in 2018. “I told him I want the centre line of Japan to be STVV players,” Tateishi recalls. The dream is now reality: goalkeeper Zion Suzuki left for Parma last summer in an €8 million deal, Shogo Taniguchi wears the captain’s armband in Limburg, and Keisuke Goto, on loan from Andercht, is third in the Belgian scoring charts.

The model is deliberate. Young prospects use Sint-Truiden as a low-risk European landing strip; established names in need of minutes drop down for game time; veterans such as Shinji Kagawa and Shinji Okazaki arrive for victory-lap seasons. English is the dressing-room language, cultural mentoring starts at the airport, and every newcomer begins language lessons before the plane departs Narita.

Results on the pitch are soaring. With six Japanese starters in the current XI, STVV sit third in the Pro League, their highest-ever position, and still entertain title hopes despite the championship-round format that halves regular-season points. A top-six finish would bring Europa Conference League revenue and, Tateishi believes, proof that a selling club can also chase silverware.

The next phase is already sketched: an STVV academy in Japan to fend off new European entrants such as Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona, who are planting flags in Hokkaido and beyond. “We need to compete,” Tateishi says. “If they reach the J-League, that’s success. If they come through to Sint-Truiden, even better.”

For now the numbers tell the story: 25 Japanese players populate Belgium’s top two tiers, 150 are spread across Europe, and 15 of the 27 Samurai Blue who trained in London this week ply their trade in the continent’s leading five leagues. The pipeline, forged amid apple blossoms and bargain budgets, shows no sign of drying up.