It was the split decision to pass the ball instead of selfishly take the shot that lost the Nationals-qualifying soccer game for Yoichi Isagi and his team.
When he returns home, the striker receives an invitation from the Japan Football Union that invited three hundred strikers to participate in a controversial project called Blue Lock.
In the Blue Lock compound, the strikers are honed into diamonds via a series of competitions that encourage egoism and selfish play in hopes to train a star striker for the Japanese World Cup team.
Although unsure at first, Isagi becomes compelled to crush the dreams of the other 299 strikers in Blue Lock to be at the top.
I’m not sure if it was just a happy accident or very clever marketing that this intensely hot-blooded, national soccer pride-encouraging sports anime aired at the same time Japan was playing in the World Cup. Regardless, if you are looking for more anime recommendations like Blue Lock, head on down below.
Anime Like Blue Lock
For Fans of Hot-Blooded Hyper Competition
One Outs
Toua Tokuchi is an athlete and a gambler. He makes his money with a serious fastball and a simplified game of baseball called One Outs.
However, one day he is approached by a veteran slugger and asked to join his long unsuccessful team, but the owner of the team doesn’t want him to threaten the money that he makes by losing.
Toua, being the gambler that he is, eventually settles that for each out he pitches, he gets 5 million yen, but for each hit, he loses 50 million.
Despite being about different sports, Blue Lock and One Outs are both more psychological sports anime.
They take a sport, don’t play it traditionally, and rely on the characters being able to read other players or even manipulate them to score big.
Both series really highlight the strategies of very talented players that engage in selfish play. It is what makes them interesting and uncommon as far as sports anime series go.
Food Wars
Ever since he was a child, Souma Yukihira helped his father cook in his restaurant, constantly challenging him to cook-offs in anticipation for the day when he would finally win.
However, when his father suddenly decides to leave to go on a trip around the world, Souma is sent to the Totsuki Culinary Academy, an elite cooking school where only the top 10 percent graduate.
Here, Souma learns that not only are some of his classmates top-tier chefs, but they also engage in intense competitions called ”food wars”.
While Food Wars is about cooking, it isn’t about how you would normally think about cooking. It is to cooking like Blue Lock is to soccer.
They engage in competition over what is otherwise a team effort. There is no single cook in a professional kitchen just as there is no single player on a soccer team, yet they both invite individuals to compete in highly intense and entertaining battles.
While Food Wars has its moments of being intense and maniacal, the intensity it uses is often more light-hearted in comparison to the occasional sense of desperation at play in Blue Lock.
Kuroko’s Basketball
For three years in a row, the Teikou Junior High basketball team took the championship crown thanks to their outstanding players. However, after graduating, the team split up and went to different high schools.
At Seirin High School, two students have been recruited to the team. Taiga, a player just returning form the US, and Kuroko, a student whose lack of presence allows him to move around the court unnoticed.
Kuroko was Teikou’s phantom sixth man who, while receiving little recognition, guided the team to victory with his assists.
While Kuroko’s Basketball is more your standard sports anime, it shares two things with Blue Lock.
The first is that Kuroko’s Basketball and Blue Lock both feature not rookies entering the sport, but rather incredibly talented players that are all competing with or against each other.
To that end, they both add an extra interest to the sports action by making those talented players have a specialty that seems a bit like their own personal super power.
Like mentioned before though, Blue Lock is unique in its set up whereas Kuroko’s Basketball is more the standard game – just made more intense with their abilities.
Eyeshield 21
As a shy and frequently bullied kid, Sena is accustomed to running away.
However, after Hiruma, the captain of the American Football team, sees his skill at running, he goes to great lengths to recruit Sena as a running back in order to turn the team’s lackluster record around.
While Eyeshield 21 is about American football and Blue Lock is about soccer, they are both sports anime where the players have special, super power-like abilities in their play.
As such, both series seek to take advantage of the abilities unique to each player on the field. What this does is make the sports action even more interesting and almost strategic.
That said, Eyeshield 21 is exciting, but more like your standard sports anime about a rookie getting good at the sport. It isn’t quite the shake up that Blue Lock is.
For Fans of Encouraging Selfish Play
Classroom of the Elite
Koudo Ikusei High School seems like a paradise with state-of-the-art facilities and where almost 100 percent of students go to university or find employment.
However, while the students appear to have a good amount of freedom, only superior students get favorable treatments.
After being careless on his entrance exams for a particular reason, Ayanokouji Kiyotaka finds himself dumped in D-Class with the other inferior students.
There is a moment early in Blue Lock where players only get certain quality food based on performance, and it immediately clicked that despite Blue Lock being a training facility, it was much like the school in Classroom of the Elite.
Both series gather talented and motivated individuals and them rank them based on their performance. The top performers get the best perks and the barest essential amenities given to the bottom serve as motivation to do better.
However, Classroom of the Elite is about the main character trying to manipulate and bring down this system while in Blue Lock, the system works as intended.
Kaiji
Kaiji Itou is a thug in the truest sense.
With his days spent drinking and stealing hubcaps, his world is turned upside down when a co-worker tricks him into taking on a huge debt.
In order to pay it off, Kaiji takes up a shady offer to participate in illegal gambling on a cruise ship that is filled with even worse scumbags than him.
Blue Lock and its emphasis on selfish play will always have a lot in common with gambling-type shows since you don’t win gambles with cooperation and teamwork.
In Blue Lock, each player can be pretty intense, but they run the gamut of personalities. In Kaiji, however, everyone is pretty much a scumbag. This encourages each and every character to only be in it for themselves and trip up the competition at every turn.
Tomodachi Game
Although he suffers from financial hardship, Yuuichi Katagiri has always been kept positive by his friends. They even inspired him to furiously work in order to get the funds to go on the school trip with them.
However, when the gathered money goes missing, his friends are blamed.
Days later, the friends all get mysterious letters that end up with them being force to join a Tomodachi Game where each game they win together lowers a debt.
However, when betrayal and secrets start pouring out, these simple games become a malicious test of trust.
Both Blue Lock and Tomodachi Game are about friendly competitive sports – simple games or soccer – but they make them ultra-competitive to an almost malicious degree.
In each series, it stresses that those who play selfishly get great rewards from it. Cooperation won’t get them the rewards they seek.
As such, both series can be pretty cutthroat, though it hits a bit harder since they are a friend group in Tomodachi Game while in Blue Lock they are often just strangers in training.
For Fans of Maniacal Character
Kakeguri
Hyakkaou Private Academy is an institution for the elite of society with a very special curriculum.
These students are the children of the wealthiest people in the world, but they won’t need athletic prowess or book smarts for a successful life, they will need to know the art of the deal and how to read people.
So instead of traditional classes, this school features a curriculum of rigorous gambling where the winners live like kings and the losers suffer.
However, they haven’t seen anything yet until they meet new student Yumeko Jabami.
Like mentioned with Kaiji, Blue Lock innately has a lot in common with gambling anime. That is the same with Kakegurui too.
Both series gather highly talented – or at least the highly privileged in Kakegurui – together in an establishment and encourages them to compete with each other to win big.
However, what these series most have in common is the above and beyond level of intensity it gives characters.
There are moments when characters seem almost psychopathic in their attitudes and expressions without ever actually harming anyone physically.
If you liked those intense expressions in Blue Lock, Kakegurui is infamous for its expressions.
Record of Ragnarok
Every 1,000 years, all gods from every religion are convened to decide the fate of humanity.
Due to their abuses against each other and the planet, the gods are about to unanimously vote for ending humanity.
However, just as it is about to pass, Brunhild, a Valkyrie, puts forth a proposal. Humans are given a chance to have 13 warriors from throughout history fight against gods in a one-on-one tournament style battle that will ultimately decide their fate.
Innately different in that Record of Ragnarok is about a fighting tournament to the death, what it shares with Blue Lock is its passion for very intense characters. They are as passionate about fighting as those in Blue Lock are about soccer, but because this is a bloody action anime, Record of Ragnarok takes things a bit further.
If you like your characters almost psychopathically intense, but want something violent, Record of Ragnarok is an anime to keep in mind.
For Fans of Soccer
Ao Ashi
In his small town, self-centered and unpredictable Ashito Aoi is the powerhouse of his junior high soccer team. However, after Aoi loses his temper, he is removed from the game in an important tournament, and they lose because of it.
Seeing his potential, Aoi is approached by a coach that invites him for tryouts in Tokyo. Once there, he finds that for the first time in his life, he is surrounded by talent and needs to grow his ability if he hopes to aim for the top.
While both series are about soccer, and very popular among sports anime fans, they are different breeds of soccer anime.
Blue Lock, because of its set up, is more unrealistic in its soccer portrayal. It is the type of soccer anime where the players have specialties that almost seem like super powers on the field.
Alternatively, Ao Ashi is grounded in realism. There’s no superpowers only struggle and gameplay.
It is also worth noting that the focuses are completely reversed as well. Blue Lock is about embracing selfish play to be a good striker while Ao Ashi is often about improving teamwork.
Regardless of this crucial difference, both series are excellent for anime for fans of soccer and easily the best anime has to offer for fans of the sport.
Days
Tsukushi is a boy who considers himself to have no special talents or traits. However, on one stormy night, he meets Jin, someone who is considered a soccer genius.
After that fateful meeting, Tsukushi finds himself dragged in to the world of soccer.
Both series are sports anime about soccer, but more than that, they are sports anime that kind of break established tropes for the sports anime genre. Blue Lock turns the sport into a more cutthroat individual competition whereas Days creates a sports anime without the standard use of rivals, team drama, or impossible-seeming obstacles.
However, you will need to keep in mind that the characters in Days are rather wholesome and a solid team. That is not really a thing in Blue Lock. Blue Lock is where nice characters go to become egoists.
Inazuma Eleven
The Raimon Middle School soccer club, Inazuma Eleven, is struggling and on the verge of being disbanded. Mamoru Endou, the team captain, is determined to stop it.
His first task is getting soccer genius Shuuya Gouenji to both play soccer again and do so on his team.
While both Blue Lock and Inazuma Eleven are both sports anime about soccer, they also both enjoy being given an extra dose of intensity and passion. Furthermore, many of the players enjoy almost super power-like abilities on the field.
The huge difference to keep in mind is the tone.
Inuzuma Eleven is intense and energetic, but in a way that is aimed at younger audiences. This stands in stark contrast to Blue Lock that is for older sports anime fans. You can enjoy both, but the difference in tone is something notable.
The Knight in the Area
Brothers Kakeru and Suguru both have a passion for soccer, but while Suguru becomes a rising star, Kakeru adopts a more managerial role. Despite being weaker on the field than his brother, Kakeru still trains with hopes to play in the World Cup one day.
In his training, he is joined by childhood friend Nana, who is a soccer prodigy in her own right. Nana aims for Japan’s Women’s National Soccer Team, Nadeshiko Japan. It is her small successes that further Kakeru’s drive.
Admittedly, the only thing Blue Lock and The Knight in the Area have in common is that they are both sports anime about soccer.
While Blue Lock shakes things up with its premise, The Knight in the Area plays out like your standard sports anime. That’s not a bad thing, but as a lot of non-sports anime fans enjoyed Blue Lock because it was different, it may not make The Knight in the Area something they would enjoy.
That aside, while of the more standard sports anime plot and progression, The Knight in the Area is still a very good sports anime for what it is.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Blue Lock? Let fans know in the comments section below.
