Blue Lock, written by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and drawn by Yusuke Nomura, started in Weekly Shonen Magazine issue 35, on sale August 1, 2018. The setup comes straight out of Japanโs exit from the 2018 World Cup. The Japan Football Union decides the country needs one striker who can score at that level, gathers 300 high school forwards into a facility called Blue Lock, and tells them that anyone knocked out loses the right to play for the national team for good. What the program trains is not passing or teamwork but ego, the instinct to take the shot yourself, and the protagonist Yoichi Isagi arrives as one of the least remarkable players in the building. The series won the shonen category of the 45th Kodansha Manga Award in May 2021.
The numbers around it are large. On June 9, 2026, a date the series marks as Blue Lock Day, the publisher announced that worldwide circulation had passed 60 million copies and opened every chapter free for 24 hours across Magazine Pocket and other digital storefronts. Volume 40, the current latest, went on sale August 17, 2026. Its special edition ships with eight clear files photographed with the cast of the live-action film.
That film opened on August 7, 2026, distributed by Toho, and is still in theaters. Yusuke Taki directs. Fumiya Takahashi plays Isagi, Kaito Sakurai plays Bachira, Kyohei Takahashi plays Chigiri, Kota Nomura plays Kunigami, and K of &TEAM plays Nagi. Masataka Kubota plays Jinpachi Ego, the man who assembles the project, and Mei Hata plays Anri Teieri.
On the anime side, season one ran 24 episodes from October 9, 2022 to March 26, 2023, and season two, subtitled VS. U-20 JAPAN, ran 14 episodes from October 6 to December 28, 2024. A sequel was announced at an event on September 28, 2025, and on June 9, 2026 it got a title, Blue Lock Neo Egoist League, along with a teaser visual. Eight Bit returns as the animation studio, with Kazuki Ura as Isagi and Mamoru Miyano as Michael Kaiser confirmed. No broadcast window has been announced as of August 21, 2026.
The English chapters are on K MANGA, with print volumes from Kodansha USA, and the Japanese originals are on Magazine Pocket. Forty volumes is a commitment, so the first anime season is a reasonable way to test whether the premise works for you, since it follows the early manga closely. Go in knowing what kind of sports story this is: the players are not building each other up, they are eliminating each other for one slot, and the appeal is watching Isagi work out what he is actually good at under that pressure. (As of August 21, 2026)
