Another metatarsal fracture. Another long lay-off. Hiroki Ito is the unlucky one this season, but if you know the Japanese's life journey, you know he's learned patience. His path to Munich – via Pelé club Santos FC and the Japanese second division – was a long one. Ito knows you have to reinvent yourself to make it at the top.
“And now?” Hiroki Ito looks around questioningly. It’s marketing day at FC Bayern, the players are jam-packed with appointments. Ito has just come from a photo shoot with adidas at the Allianz Arena. And now? “Ah, the interview,” he says, more to himself than to the people standing around him. A minute later and he’s made himself comfortable in a quiet corner and looks expectant. The first question: if we went back 20 years, what kind of Hiroki would we meet? “I loved football already as a child,” he begins. “I probably get that from my dad. I always wanted to be a footballer and play for a big club in a big European league.” One of his first memories is the 2006 World Cup. “I was seven years old and watched it all on TV.” Now he’s sitting in the Allianz Arena, where that World Cup was opened. This here is the intersection between Ito’s childhood dreams and reality. How did he make it from the Far East to here?
Ito moved to Munich from VfB Stuttgart last summer. Now he has to grin as he thinks back – at the time he was sweating. It was early June of last year, Ito had a World Cup qualifier with Japan in Myanmar. After the match, his agent phoned and told him that Bayern wanted to sign him. “I was totally surprised but I didn’t need a minute to make a decision.” But that was when the stress started. Ito had big plans with his wife to celebrate their wedding in Japan during the summer break. Now he had to fit in a flight to Munich in order to complete the medical and sign the contract. “My wife was worried I wouldn’t make it back in time,” he reveals. “We’d planned the party for six months. If I hadn’t been there...” Luckily everything turned out well.
Learning the Pelé way
Ito’s roots lie in Hamamatsu, a city on Japan’s east coast, slightly smaller in population that Munich. This is where he grew up and started playing football. Specifically he started with futsal, at the Mario Futsal School, just five minutes away from his house. “I was five years old and always went there with a friend,” he says. The owner of the school, Mario Yasumitsu, was astonished by the young Hiroki’s enthusiasm. “If training started at 6 pm, he was often already there at 4:30,” he recalled. Yasumitsu also put him in touch with the football school run by Pelé’s club Santos FC in Hamamatsu. Ito says that he also trained there regularly for a year or two. Once he even travelled to Brazil for 10 days at a Santos training camp. Futsal training and working with coaches from the academy of a major Brazilian club shaped Ito's game. And his strong left foot: “Passes, shots, I did everything with my left foot as a child.”
„In Germany I had to learn how to defend smartly.”
Hiroki Ito
However, Ito says he didn’t begin “properly” with football until the age of 10 or 11. And that was at school, which plays an important role in youth development in Japan. At 15, he then joined the academy of J.League club Júbilo Iwata, in the neighbouring city of Iwata. He signed his first professional contract three years later. There’s a video of Ito when he was playing for the Júbilo U18 team, where he has to map his footballer profile in a hexagon. Each corner represents a quality: technique, stamina, physicality, speed, attack, defence. He could give a maximum of six points for each. Ito somewhat sheepishly holds the board with the profile he has drawn up in front of the camera: he had mainly given himself three points, he gave himself the most points (four) for ‘attack’ and the fewest (two) for ‘defence’.
It should be pointed out: Ito was playing in midfield at the time. But as a young pro, suddenly he pretty much stopped playing. In his first professional season in 2018, he made a solitary J.League appearance; in his second (2019) – on loan at Nagoya Grampus – it was two. In total he played 48 minutes of top-flight football in two years, which was hard for him. He was “rotting away” at the time, he once said. And who knows what would have happened if the experienced Shunsuke Nakamura hadn't been his team-mate. If he had to list all the people to whom he owes a lot as a footballer, Shunsuke would be the first person he would have to name, says Ito: “He often did an extra session with me after team training. He also helped me a lot back then through conversations.”
Ito had to swallow criticism, change his game, reinvent himself. That’s when he was moved back into defence for the first time during training, usually at left-back. He didn’t like it, though. Ito saw himself as a holding midfielder. Only after the year on loan in Nagoya did that change, thanks in part to Júbilo’s head coach at the time, Fernando Jubero. The Spaniard shifted Ito into the centre of defence. “I didn’t even know how to defend,” admits Ito, “but with each day I learned – and eventually I noticed that I feel very comfortable in this position. I liked having the whole play in front of me.”
A winner all of a sudden
Jubero saw something in Ito that he himself had never identified. “Hiroki had the perfect profile for the position of centre-back,” explains the Spaniard, who now works in coach education for the Brazilian Football Confederation. Tackling, tactical discipline, anticipation and build-up play are among the qualities that qualified Ito for his new position. And something else he liked: “Hiroki loved competition, played full of confidence and that gave assurance to the whole team. He had the mentality of a winner on and off the pitch.” The year 2020 was a turning point for Ito. Not even the Covid-19 pandemic could stop him now. “There was a pause in the season in Japan at that time, and then we often had two matches in a week,” recalls Ito. “I played every minute of every match, which helped me very much. I felt like a proper professional footballer for the first time during that period.”
He was playing in the second tier with Júbilo Iwata at that time. Then Stuttgart came calling and signed him for their reserve team in 2021. “But I never played for them,” smirks Ito. It was straight into the Bundesliga for the 22-year-old from the Japanese second division. How did he manage it? “I’m often asked that but I don’t know either,” explains Ito. It just happened. When he arrived in Stuttgart, he trained with the first team straight away and wasn’t sent back. What with Covid, players from the second string often had to help out the senior squad. In early August 2021, he started for VfB in a DFB Cup match against Dynamo Berlin. Three weeks later, he made his Bundesliga debut.
It was a huge step from Japan to Germany, says Ito. “The tempo, the intensity, the physicality, the atmosphere in the stadiums – everything was different to what I was used to.” He explains that it was only in Germany that he really learned what it means to defend: “At 1.88 metres, I was normally the tallest player on the pitch in Japan. That made it easy for me to win balls. But now, all of a sudden, the forwards were just as big, quick and strong as me. I didn’t have any physical advantage anymore. I had to learn how to defend smartly.” That also means being quicker in the mind than the attacker.
„At Bayern you don't just have to win every game, you have to dominate every game.”
Hiroki Ito
He went through this school for two years, battling against relegation with Stuttgart. “Then a new coach came in, Sebastian Hoeneß, and our game completely changed,” he recounts. Now the focus was on possession instead of defending. “We practised playing out from the back, keeping the ball, controlling the match and the opponents, and in the end scoring a goal.”
In an interview with the Japanese sports magazine Number last summer, Ito used glasses and coasters to demonstrate how he learned to build up play from the back, how you escape the opposition press and find a free team-mate. The situation is reminiscent of the legendary dinner with Pep Guardiola and Thomas Tuchel, where the pair swapped ideas about match situations with salt and pepper shakers. Ito also likes to pore over tactics, also likes to have the ball and not give it away. And then Bayern got in touch.
Finally Champions League
Ito felt warmly received in Munich, he explains: “Serge Gnabry took me to a Japanese restaurant straight away.” He enjoyed every training session on the pitch. “Everyone always gives their all. It’s great fun.” But then, in late July, he suffered a metatarsal fracture in a friendly at 1. FC Düren. “My opponent caught me on the foot,” he recalls. “I felt some pain but carried on playing for another 15 minutes. Then I couldn’t go on.” Ito had to be operated on, and then for a second time in November. He was sidelined for six months in total. “That was obviously a tough time.” But anyone who’s been on a long journey like Ito’s doesn’t let an injury get them down that easily.
In mid-February, he celebrated his comeback in the away match at Celtic. It was also his first ever Champions League appearance. “That was a dream come true,” he says. “Just hearing the anthem was an unbelievable feeling. And then to play… I didn’t expect it at all.” Less than two weeks later, he scored his first goal in an FCB shirt, netting from a corner in the home game against Eintracht Frankfurt to become Bayern’s first ever Japanese goalscorer in the Bundesliga. Did he know that? Ito looks in disbelief. “Really? Did Takashi Usami never score?” he asks. No, only in the DFB Cup. Ito beams.
Once again, he’s succeeded in making a new start. The boy from Hamamatsu, the Stuttgart high-flyer, has become a Bavarian. “I really like the mentality here, the ‘Mia san mia’,” he adds. What does that mean for him? “At Bayern, you don't just have to win every game, you have to dominate every game for 90 minutes. At Bayern, how you win is also important.” Ito has arrived in Europe at one of the biggest clubs in the world, just as he once dreamed. “I very much like wearing this shirt,” he says. Of course, expectations on him in his homeland are now massive but that doesn't bother him, he says, before hurrying off to his next appointment at the Allianz Arena. “I love challenges.” After all, Hiroki Ito knows how you grow from them.
This article originally appeared in a different version in the members' magazine ‘51’.
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