Homare Sawa

Homare Sawa: The Captain Who Beat the Odds

In the 117th minute of the 2011 World Cup final, with Japan a goal down to the United States and the tournament slipping away, Homare Sawa met a corner at the near post and flicked it, with the outside of her boot, into the far corner. It was her fifth goal of the tournament and the last competitive act of consequence in a match Japan would win on penalties. Four months earlier her country had been devastated by earthquake and tsunami. She was 32, playing in her sixth World Cup, and about to become the first Asian player of any gender to be named FIFA World Player of the Year.

A Girl on a Boys' Team

Sawa was born on 6 September 1978 in Fuchū, Tokyo. She started at six, when her older brother's coach invited her to join his boys' team — the only route available to a girl who wanted to play seriously in early-1980s Japan. She was in the country's first division by twelve.

That is not a rounding error. In 1991, aged twelve, she made her professional debut for Yomiuri Beleza. By fifteen she was an international: on 6 December 1993 she made her Japan debut and scored four goals against the Philippines.

Beleza, and the American Detour

Her first Beleza spell ran from 1991 to 1999 — 136 league matches, 79 goals, playing as a forward, five titles and five selections in the league's Best Eleven between 1993 and 1998. Her contract was cancelled in 1999, and she went to the United States.

She played in the Women's United Soccer Association from 2001 to 2003, for the Denver Diamonds and the Atlanta Beat, where she scored the franchise's first-ever goal. The league folded in 2003 and she returned to Beleza, then went back to America in 2008 when the Washington Freedom selected her in the WPS International Draft; she was a fixture in their midfield for two seasons.

In January 2011 she joined INAC Kobe Leonessa, and won the L.League championship in three consecutive seasons from 2011 to 2013. Across her career she collected eleven league titles and eight domestic cups, and was named to the Japanese league's Best XI in eleven separate seasons.

The Record That May Never Fall

Sawa played in six World Cups — Sweden 1995, the United States in 1999 and 2003, China 2007, Germany 2011 and Canada 2015 — a record she shares with Brazil's Formiga. She played in four Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012. She finished with 205 caps and 83 goals, both Japanese national records.

At Beijing 2008 she was Japan's top scorer as the team reached its first Olympic medal match. At London 2012 Japan took silver, beaten 2-1 by the United States in the final.

Germany 2011

Japan went into the 2011 World Cup ranked fourth and were not favourites for anything. Sawa scored a hat-trick against Mexico, becoming the oldest player to score a World Cup hat-trick. She scored five goals in total, enough for the Golden Boot, and won the Golden Ball as the tournament's outstanding player — the only time a player has taken both at a Women's World Cup and captained the winners.

The final against the United States ended 2-2 after her 117th-minute equaliser, and Japan won the shootout 3-1. It was, as Britannica puts it, Asia's first major honour in the sport. On 9 January 2012 she was named FIFA Women's World Player of the Year, the first Asian person of any gender to win a major year-end individual football award.

She was not finished. At the 2014 AFC Women's Asian Cup she scored the opening goal in the semi-final; Japan won the final 1-0. She had already been AFC Women's Player of the Year in 2004 and L.League MVP in 2006 and 2008, and was inducted into the Asian Football Hall of Fame in November 2014.

The Exit

Sawa played her sixth and last World Cup in 2015, ending in a 5-2 final defeat to the United States. She announced her retirement on 16 December 2015 and finished the domestic season. Her final match was the Empress's Cup final on 27 December 2015, in which she scored the winning goal — a closing line most players would not dare write into a script.

Why Homare Is Called a Genius

The claim needs stating plainly: Sawa's case rests on football intelligence, not on intellect in any academic sense, and not on physical gifts either. She stood five foot four and Britannica's assessment of her is characteristically blunt — an aggressive midfield player whose compact stature did not diminish her intensity. She was never the quickest or the strongest player on the pitch.

What she had was the reading of space that separates a good central midfielder from a great one: knowing, before receiving the ball, where the pressure was coming from and where the outlet would be; arriving in the box at the moment the defence had committed elsewhere. The 2011 equaliser is the purest exhibit. It was not a powerful finish. It was a flick with the outside of the boot from a near-post run, executed in the 117th minute of a World Cup final by a 32-year-old who had made the correct read of a corner routine while exhausted. That is technique under pressure, and it is a cognitive act as much as a muscular one.

The honest counter-case is that this is a footballer's craft, not genius in the way the word applies to a physicist or a composer, and that no serious observer has argued otherwise. Nor did she carry Japan alone; the 2011 side was a coherent, well-drilled collective whose passing culture was the real story. What is defensible is that she was the most complete decision-maker Asian football has produced, sustained across 205 internationals and 22 years — and that FIFA, in 2011, agreed.

Legacy

Sawa attended Teikyo University briefly in 1999 before leaving to play in America. She married the former Vegalta Sendai player Hiroaki Tsujikami in August 2015 and had a daughter in January 2017. She works as a broadcaster for TV Tokyo and serves as an ambassador for the Japan Football Association; in 2013 she was made an ambassador for Tokyo's successful bid for the 2020 Olympics.

Her real monument is structural. Japan's 2011 victory, arriving months after the Tōhoku disaster, gave women's football in Asia a legitimacy it had never possessed, and Sawa — a girl who had to join a boys' team to get a game — was its face. The professional pathways that exist for Japanese girls today were built on the back of a tournament she decided.

Achievements

• Worked as association football player