Last Man Standing - The Icons

off the top of my head:

Naoki Matsuda (Yokohama F Marinos, he s been playing there since 1995)

Nobuhisa Yamada (Urawa Red Diamonds, as of last sunday he s still in the starting 11...too bad he s missing from the Urawa Reds roster in SWOS even though he played like 45 matches that year...)


Those who have changed teams:

Masashi Nakayama (Jubilo Iwata, he played there from 1990 to 2009 and then moved to J2 side Consadole Sapporo, he hasn t played much this year though)

Masayuki Okano (Urawa Red Diamonds at the time, he s in JFL at Gainare Tottori nowadays)

Kazuyoshi Miura (one of the original Yomiuri Verdy Kawasaki senators, he s currently playing for the former-Yokohama-Flugels-now-Yokohama-FC).


Retired:

Hiroaki Morishima (Cerezo Osaka, he played there from 1991 to 2008)

BTW - what is it with Japanese teams names in SWOS? were there any copyright issues that time SWOS was produced or what?

As far as I know the JFA (Japan Football Association) goes down in history for being the very first soccer federation to place their league rights concession under strict rules, much like the american sports federations (such as NBA, NHL, MLB and the likes) have been doing since the late 70 s.

Basically they put in charge a commitee and treated the whole league as a brand for a while and back then (talking about the period between 1992 and 1998) at least 1/4 of their incomes came from licensing and merchandising sales (Mizuno bought the rights to provide uniforms to all of the teams, Konami, SEGA, Epoch, etc. paid their fair share to put the teams into their videogames, NHK got a hold of the TV broadcasting rights and so forth), so Sensible Software probably figured that they would ve had to pay quite the penny to put the real team names into the game and resorted to use fake ones instead (the players names were prolly already under the FIFPro license so J.League and JFA sorta had to concede those ones and couldn t do much about it).

Dunno why the JFL (the non-professional third tier of the Japanese club football system, it s called League in SWOS) teams names were modified as well, since, AFAIK, there shouldn t have been licensing issues regarding any of them for the sole fact that they were (and still are, at least some of them) amateur clubs oftentimes affiliated to companies and universities.

As of today Konami owns the exclusive rights to both the Japan National team and the J.League (they actually paid a fortune for them a few years ago...), which is why the J.League is the only major league missing from Electronic Arts soccer games (FIFA, etc.).

Arsène Wenger needs to be on there.

There are probably lots more. It s only been... 14 years...

Janne Saarinen - HJK Helsinki

Ah ok