The 2026 World Cup has kicked off, co-hosted by three nations: Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
For readers living in North America, this is a rare summer, one in which soccer is woven into everyday conversation. MLS continues to grow in popularity, and European league matches are now a routine sight on sports bar TVs. Even so, soccer in America remains a developing sport compared to football or baseball.
Japan's situation is, in some ways, similar. Since making its World Cup debut in 1998, Japanese soccer has grown to the point where it regularly sends players to Europe's top leagues. But it has only been part of the national sporting fabric for about three decades.
What's striking is that, within that short history, Japan has built up an unusual cultural asset: soccer manga. What follows is a look at three works that could only have emerged from a soccer-latecomer nation, offered as companion reading for the World Cup.
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BLUE LOCK, by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura, rewrites the classic sports-manga formula of \"friendship, effort, victory\" with considerable nerve. To produce \"the world's most egoistic striker\" capable of winning Japan a World Cup, 300 high school forwards are gathered in a facility and culled through a survival-format competition.
The premise evokes Squid Game more than Captain Tsubasa, and that's exactly the point: the engine of the story is not the aesthetics of team sport but the logic of a death game. Anyone eliminated forfeits their shot at the national team forever. The only way to survive is to outmaneuver your own teammates. The \"friendship\" element of classic sports manga is replaced here by rivalry on the cut line, with selfishness reframed as the highest virtue.
What the cast unleashes in this extreme environment is a parade of superhuman finishing shots and idiosyncratic one-liners. Once you've picked a favorite character, half the fun is scanning real-life starting elevens for someone who fits the same archetype.
![\"\"](\"https://framerusercontent.com/images/fiB4zUkJf1qPlDql0tszlBlSV4.png\")
Tsuyoshi Yasuda's DAYS sits at the opposite pole. The protagonist, Tsukushi Tsukamoto, has no competitive experience before enrolling at a soccer powerhouse high school. His athletic ability is unremarkable, and there's no hint of innate talent. For readers expecting the acrobatic set pieces of Captain Tsubasa or BLUE LOCK, he is a strikingly thin presence at the center of the page.
The work's distinct move is to view the struggles and growth of gifted players, on and off the pitch, through the eyes of a benchwarmer who barely registers in athletic terms.
Tsukushi never stops running, and his clumsy intensity gradually nudges his more talented teammates past their own ceilings. The accumulation of small moments, where one person quietly pushes another forward, gives the story the raw heat specific to high school sports. Team sports, it turns out, make an ideal stage for a coming-of-age ensemble drama about growth and mutual support.
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Naoshi Arakawa's linked works Sayonara, Football and Farewell, My Dear Cramer stake out yet another position. The protagonist, Nozomi Onda, is technically the equal of any boy on her team. But due to physical-size differences, she is barred from taking the field in official matches. Before skill or passion can even enter the equation, an inborn condition stands in her way.
The narrative center here is neither a comeback from defeat nor a giant-killing run. It's the question of where a character who has been outside the framework of the sport from the start can begin her own story.
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In the sequel, Farewell, My Dear Cramer, Nozomi joins the women's soccer club at a local high school known for being weak, and meets teammates burning with their own love of the game. Phrased that way, it sounds like the start of a satisfying underdog run. But what becomes more visible, as these girls pour their passion into soccer, is the unfavorable environment surrounding them.
That gap is captured in a line from the club's faculty advisor in Volume 1: \"Is there any future in girls’ soccer?\" By focusing equally on the girls' devotion to the game and the barriers that limit their opportunities, Arakawa gives his clean, restrained artwork a sense of real-world weight.
", "url": "https://lp.emaqi.com/blog-list/soccer-manga-for-the-world-cup-year-stories-of-underdogs", "title": "Soccer Manga for the World Cup Year: Stories of Underdogs", "summary": "Description", "date_modified": "2026-06-03T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "sports" ] }, { "id": "urn:sha256:fde8a5549b40c45a2535975ac9a3b80f33bdfd020299ed824e74ac61b5c7f214", "content_html": "If Tokyo Revengers left you wondering why Japanese delinquents look so impossibly cool, OUT is a natural next stop.
Just know that, while it shares the same yankii lineage, it plays the genre very differently. This isn't one of those stylish coming-of-age stories where fights mostly serve as emotional punctuation. In OUT, violence sits at the center of nearly everything. Conflicts escalate fast, grudges linger, and every thrown punch tends to demand more pages of cleanup than the punch itself.
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It's a bit like sitting down for The Fast and the Furious and slowly realizing you're now watching Goodfellas.
Japan has a long-running genre called yankii manga. It's not just \"delinquent manga\"- it's a tradition with its own fashion, aesthetics, codes of friendship, and a recurring interest in where kids who don't fit anywhere actually belong. OUT sits within that tradition, but keeps its distance from the genre's more romantic tendencies.
Despite the spelling, yankii doesn't mean \"Yankee\" in the American sense.
The term generally refers to Japan's delinquent youth culture, particularly from the 1980s through the early 2000s. The image is familiar: towering pompadours, embroidered tokkō-fuku coats, customized motorcycles, and a categorical refusal to respect authority.
From the outside, the style can look a little theatrical. Within Japan, though, yankii culture developed into a recognizable social world with its own codes, fashion, and ideas about loyalty.
![\"\"](\"https://framerusercontent.com/images/BgolZ7u7XNYYV6W7QtlVtC4WQE.png\")
And this is the part that matters: yankii manga is less interested in organized crime than it is in relationships.
Where Western gang fiction often centers on money, territory, or power within a criminal organization, yankii manga tends to revolve around pride, hierarchy, friendship, and belonging. Characters fight for reputation, for loyalty, or simply because their place within a group feels threatened.
Beneath the bravado, many of these stories are about young people trying to find a community outside of school, family, or conventional expectations.
That double layer is what gives the genre its particular appeal. A yankii manga can feel part sports rivalry, part social drama, part street brawl and it works precisely because it's all of those at once.
![\"\"](\"https://framerusercontent.com/images/SQmkMU1N9Mtu4i4Wm2qzpfmr2U.png\")
OUT follows directly in that tradition, alongside classics like Rokudenashi Blues, Shōnan Junai Gumi, and Crows. But where those series often leave room for nostalgia or rebellious charm, OUT strips most of that away.
The brotherhood remains. The violence becomes much harder to romanticize.
Part of what makes OUT interesting is its relationship to its author, Tatsuya Iguchi.
Iguchi is both the writer and the basis for the protagonist, drawing on his own years living the delinquent life. He also appears, in fictionalized form, in Drop, the semi-autobiographical manga by comedian Hiroshi Shinagawa.
Drop approaches delinquent youth with a noticeably warmer tone. There are fights and bad decisions, sure, but just as much room is given to the awkwardness of adolescence, friendships, quiet crushes, and the strange nostalgia of growing up reckless.
OUT takes nearly the same ingredients and arranges them into something far less comfortable.
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It opens with Iguchi leaving juvenile detention and trying to live a slightly more responsible life. That peace doesn't last long.
As the story develops, violence starts to seep into every relationship around him. Toughness becomes social currency. Loyalty turns possessive. Winning a fight rarely solves anything - it usually just lines up a larger problem behind it.
Now and then, the manga lets you see how young these characters really are beneath the posturing. Between the swagger and the gang feuds, their actual faces show through for a moment, and that contrast is where much of OUT's weight comes from. The characters want connection and stability, but the only system they have for pursuing either is one built on intimidation and conflict.
Violence in OUT isn't framed as something that empowers you. It's framed as something that keeps reproducing itself.
And somehow, or maybe because of that, it's hard to stop reading.
![\"\"](\"https://framerusercontent.com/images/90NaorY7ShIz0CPlQp3zQyKji8.png\")
OUT artist Makoto Mizuta explores similar territory in another series, The Bouncer.
Its protagonist, Joichiro Shishido, also carries instinctive violence as part of his identity. The Bouncer, though, spends more of its time on a different question than OUT does: whether someone shaped by violence can eventually find another role in society.
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Read side by side, the two series point to something running beneath much of the yankii genre. Winning or losing in fights isn't the only factor that drives these stories.
More often, the real question is about belonging - who gets accepted, who gets pushed out, and whether people can still connect with others across the scars that violence leaves behind.
", "url": "https://lp.emaqi.com/blog-list/out-the-delinquent-manga-where-every-fight-just-makes-things-worse", "title": "OUT: The Delinquent Manga Where Every Fight Just Makes Things Worse", "summary": "Description", "date_modified": "2026-05-20T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "column" ] }, { "id": "urn:sha256:e9064cf4be4d527693d0e548142445b7ad1572f34b79e039e3b10835ebdae9d3", "content_html": "You can choose to set up different types of input fields depending on your content. For instance, a blog might have a title, a slug, and a long-form field for formatted content. These may be different for a product directory or a photo blog, where you may need to add an image field. To edit the fields each CMS item will have, click on any of the column titles. This will trigger a modal to add new fields, where you can also re-arrange the fields or modify or delete the existing ones.
After setting up the content, go back to the canvas. Your collections are accessible from the Insert menu. Open the Insert menu, navigate to the CMS Content section, and drag and drop your collection onto the canvas. This will add a special stack with layers connected to your data. From here, you can edit the visual properties on the right, just as you would do with a regular Stack.
If you wish to add a page instead that will automatically be populated with data from the CMS, navigate to the left panel. One you are in the Pages tab, click on the + button next to the CMS section. If you add the Index page, a page will be added with a list of all of the items in your collection. If you add the Detail page, you will be presented with a page with content from your individual items.
Note: If you chose to add the sample data, a new detail page called /blog will be added to your website, and you will find the stack of content added into the page for you.
The detail page will display content pulled from the first entry of the collection by default. In order to preview other items in the collection, change the content by selecting a different item from the dropdown menu.
", "url": "https://lp.emaqi.com/blog-list/getting-started", "title": "Space Battleship Tiramisu", "summary": "Description", "date_modified": "2026-01-26T15:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "cms", "basics" ] }, { "id": "urn:sha256:afcbc2b9154077d3c2893aa1cb6f34a70b967e93d1df7888d64ba1bdd6717d9e", "content_html": "To add Pagination, select your Collection List, click on Pagination, select one of the two options, then pick how many items to load. Pagination also works with existing Limits and Start Offsets. Both the Spinner and Button are completely customizable, and you can pick any Variant for their Loading states. The Spinner itself is just a layer with a conic gradient and a Loop Effect, so you get full control. Adding Pagination helps make your blogs and changelogs much faster to load, especially when they contain dozens of items.
Infinite Scrolling with custom Spinner component
Load More Button with custom Button component
Enjoy freeform positioning of both components
Design your own Loading and Hidden states
Make your CMS Pages much faster to load
We've added the ability to filter your collection lists in the CMS. This allows you to keep your content in a single collection, yet customize how that collection is presented on each of your web pages. For example, if you're creating docs for your app, you might want to filter articles per topic on your homepage. Or when creating a blog, you might want to filter your blog posts per category.
", "url": "https://lp.emaqi.com/blog-list/whats-new", "title": "A Side Character's Love Story", "summary": "Description", "date_modified": "2026-01-19T15:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "updates" ] }, { "id": "urn:sha256:8fa4c6bc2ffa26a04d76e68deb9e75cf0a3c193bc871c20dfaee0ce4826a28f7", "content_html": "This quality update brings canvas and layer panel improvements. We've updated the Component symbol throughout the app to differentiate it from Grids. Plus, we've made Primary Breakpoints and Variants more distinct in the left panel, making it easier to see if you're editing the primary or an instance. Breakpoints will now also show the ranges in the layer panel. See more updates below.
Last month, we added support for automatic tinting and new layout options for components, plus a whole lot of fixes and improvements. If you give your Page a Fill color, this will now also tint browsers like Safari and will ensure you don't get plain white backgrounds when overscrolling on any mobile device. Plus, we've added support for Min Max sizing to all Smart and Code components, greatly simplifying many common layouts and patterns. See the full changelog below.
We automatically set the body background, based on your Page's fill color
You can now override the body background and customize per breakpoint
We now support Min Max sizing for all Smart and Code Component
We now consistently show the Min Max hint within the property panel
You can now use all alignment options for layers with Position set to Fixed
We now inform you if a parent layer height changes due to layout edits
We improved the Radius and Padding controls, no longer resetting values
Number inputs split in four no longer show steppers, so longer values fit
We improved Appear Effects using Scale with Spring transitions
Make sure your file is exported as a \"CSV\" file, also known as a \"Comma Separated Values\" file. If you encounter any issues you'll want to verify your file is UTF-8 encoded and less than 5mb. If your file is larger than that, try removing columns you may not need. See below for additional information on specific fields.
Tip: You do not have to import every column from your CSV. Only fields set up in your CMS collection in the next step will be imported.
Formatted text content needs to be formatted as HTML. Many tags are supported, such as paragraphs and headers <p>,<h1>, <h2>), formatting (<em>, <i>, <strong>), links (<a>), lists (<ol>, <ul>, <li>) and images (<img>). Images from URLs will be automatically downloaded from their original source and imported into Framer.
Images in your CSV content must be URLs to an image. They will be downloaded and imported into Framer. Relative paths are not supported.
Recommended format is ISO8601 compliant, for example: 2023-12-17T14:42:00. The shorthand value of year-month-day is also supported, for example: 1982-12-01. Long format strings may work, but will depend on your browser, for example: Tue May 12 2020 18:50:21 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time). All time data, including time zone information, will be stripped from the date.
A color formatted as CSS hexadecimal RGB code, rgb, hls or hlv expression, or a named color. All variants with an alpha value are also supported. Examples: #00ffee, rgb(0, 153, 255), hsla(204, 100%, 50%, 0.5), blue, darkgreen, rebeccapurple.
A boolean value. Y, yes, TRUE, 1 will be interpreted as the toggle being \"Yes\", all other values will be \"No\".
Here is a checklist to prepare your CMS collection for importing.
Verify each field/column in your CSV has a matching field in your CMS collection with the same name.
Include a unique field for each item, often named \"Slug\"
Verify that your data types match (eg. a CMS Date field for a date field in your data)
Tip: Framer uses your Slug field to identify each item, and will use it to update that item with repeat imports.
You can find the Import feature by going to the CMS in your project, and clicking \"Import\" in the toolbar. From there, you can select your CSV file for importing. You may also drag & drop your CSV file directly into the CMS collection interface.
Tip: Importing supports Undo / Redo actions. If you're not happy with the import, you can simply undo the change with CMD+Z on MacOS or CTRL + Z on Windows. Redo will not re-run the import, but instantly apply the changes to the collection.
To update your content, you can import into the same collection again. If any item in the new import has a slug field that matches one of the items in your collection, you will be able to update it or skip importing it again.
", "url": "https://lp.emaqi.com/blog-list/importing-content", "title": "Importing Content", "summary": "Description", "date_modified": "2025-12-12T15:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "cms", "pro-tips" ] }, { "id": "urn:sha256:08bbc260dd87af4656806293531cc4824aa2d71103c9b65e96c8360f9c5a53bd", "content_html": "Use analytics tools to understand demographic data and user behavior. Tailor your content to address audience needs and interests, solving their specific problems. Conduct keyword research with tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush. Analyze industry trends and competitors to select relevant and trending topics that improve SEO. Utilize headline analyzers like CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer. Craft titles that are clear, specific, and contain high-ranking keywords. Use power words to increase click-through rates.
![\"\"](\"https://framerusercontent.com/images/YO2LFCfSJZZyTjZNdFYu6T8E8w.png\")
Organize Your Content
Implement a clear structure using HTML tags for headings (H1, H2, H3) and lists (<ul>, <ol>). This enhances readability and SEO. Leverage CSS for formatting to improve UX. Embed high-quality images, infographics, charts, and graphs. Use Framer for creating visuals and optimize them with alt text for SEO. Ensure they are mobile-responsive. Place keywords naturally within the content, especially in headings and subheadings. Optimize meta descriptions, image alt texts, and use internal and external links.
![\"\"](\"https://framerusercontent.com/images/YIFrJsOIs8KEZHMPPfSEnDYqM.png\")
Consider adding pagination for extensive content lists, enhancing performance by reducing load times and improving user experience by making large amounts of content more readable and navigable. Additionally, pagination benefits SEO by facilitating easier search engine crawling and reducing bounce rates. By selecting a list of content coming from the blog, you can click the blue plus icon at the bottom to add infinite scrolling or a load more button. If you add pagination with infinite scrolling, try to avoid positioning layouts like pivots and footers below the loading content. This will help minimize layout shifts, thus not harming SEO.
Header 1 | Header 2 | Header 3 |
|---|---|---|
Cell 1-1 | Cell 1-2 | Cell 1-3 |
Cell 2-1 | Cell 2-2 | Cell 2-3 |
Utilize the built-in Framer analytics to track performance metrics and adjust content strategy based on data insights. By combining these best practices with technical best techniques, you can create a blog that not only engages and informs but also performs well in search rankings and user engagement. Happy blogging!
", "url": "https://lp.emaqi.com/blog-list/best-practices", "title": "Best Practices", "summary": "Description", "date_modified": "2025-11-30T15:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "pro-tips" ] } ] }