Top 5 Best Sports Anime To Get You In The Super Bowl Mood

TV & Film

Jan 30

The Super Bowl is just around the corner, and whether you’re a sportsball fan or not, you recognize that it’s a pretty big deal. However, did you know that there is a huge area where nerd culture and sports intersect? Sports anime! It’s a rather popular anime genre with several titles throughout the medium’s history. Here are the top five sports anime that will get you fired up.

Honorable Mention: ‘PuraOre! PRIDE OF ORANGE’

Despite its popularity, hockey has only one anime based around it: PuraOra! PRIDE OF ORANGE. This anime follows four third-year junior high girls in the school’s embroidery club who turn to hockey: Manaka and Ayaka Mizusawa, Mami Ono, and Kaoruko Yanagida. The four try out the sport at a class hosted by the local hockey team known as the Dream Monkeys, and it’s there that they meet two other junior high students: Riko Saginuma and Naomi Takagi. The girls keep attending these classes until they make the team. While it’s a decent slice-of-life anime, it has a lack of identity, mixing sports and idol anime tropes together into one. For hockey fans, it might be disappointing that the focus is less on the sport itself and more on just the daily lives of these girls. Nonetheless, as the only hockey anime to exist as of this writing, it has earned this honorable mention. There are a select few hockey manga out there, though, if you really need your anime-styled hockey fix. Perhaps one day, there will be a hockey anime that's Gretsky or Ovechkin level.

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5. ‘IGPX’

IGPX is an interesting sports anime in that it’s not necessarily based on a real sport but a fictional sport using high-tech fighting mechs. The series is a co-production between Cartoon Network’s Toonami and Production I.G. The story revolves around Team Satomi, and the members of this team are Takeshi Jin (voiced by Haley Joel Osment), Amy Stapleton (voiced by Hyden Walch), and Liz Riccaro. It is filled with fast and intense racing action and features appearances by several well-known voice talent that are not often seen in anime dubbing including Tom Kenny as the race announcer Benjamin Bright and Mark Hamil as Yamma of rival team Sledgemama. It’s an amazing science fiction sports anime that is currently re-running on Adult Swim’s Toonami block as of this writing, so go check it out!

4. ‘Haikyuu!!’

Haikyuu!! is another intense sports anime, this time about volleyball. The show focuses on a boy named Shoyo Hinata who became obsessed with volleyball after catching a glimpse of Karasuno High School playing in their championship game. Unfortunately for him, there isn’t a boy’s volleyball team for him to join in junior high, so he makes his own, leading him to play and lose his only official game as a junior high student to a team consisting of a setter named Tobio Kageyama, who is nicknamed the king of the court. Hinata is not discouraged by this, however, as he trains in the interim period before attending Karsuno High School himself. Once there, he joins the school’s volleyball club, but he soon learns that Kageyama is on the team. Can the two of them put their old rivalry aside and work as a team? It’s a fun, comedic take on the sport that is still full of intense volleyball action. The anime is available on Crunchyroll, but for fans of dubbed anime, though the title has an English dub, it is not available for streaming anywhere.

3. ‘Big Windup!’

Big Windup! is not your average baseball anime. It focuses on high schooler Ren Mihashi who was the starting pitcher of his middle school’s baseball team, but he was only really in that position due to his grandfather owning the school. This caused him to be bullied for his perceived lack of skill, causing him to have low self-esteem and a lack of faith in his own abilities. However, once he reaches high school, he finds himself once again part of the baseball team, and this time, his new teammates (particularly catcher Takaya Abe) actually believe in him, and it turns out Mihashi might actually be a better pitcher than he realizes. It’s a comedic yet touching anime that uses baseball as a tool to explore self-worth and confidence, and it’s also available to stream on Crunchyroll dubbed or subbed, so go check it out!

2. ‘Blue Lock’

hough it may appear like your typical soccer anime on the outside, Blue Lock is anything but. It focuses on Yoichi Isagi, a forward for his high school’s soccer team, as he and several other high school forwards are placed in an experimental training program known as Blue Lock. Led by Jinpachi Ego, this program is focused on developing a skilled striker for the Japanese team as they seek to win the World Cup. The theory behind the program is that the best strikers often have big egos and think more about their own success rather than the team, and that is what Team Japan is lacking. The teens are pitted against each other as they live and train in the Blue Lock facility. It’s an interesting anime and is available on Crunchyroll in both dub and sub forms, so if you’re looking for a psychological thriller soccer anime, give it a watch!

1. ‘Eyeshield 21’

Eyeshield 21 is a classic and vastly underrated football anime. It follows high school first-year Sena Kobayakawa, an introverted kid who has essentially been everyone’s servant all of his life, as he tries to find himself and make his way through high school. However, he is once again accosted by bullies who trick him into doing their dirty work. This doesn’t go as planned, and he is jumped by them after school. It is while he is running away from them that he is spotted by Yoichi Hiruma, the leader of the school’s football club and team, the Devil Bats. Initially, Sena was only going to join the club as a manager, but he is roped into playing as well, publicly going as Eyeshield 21 while on the field so another team won’t scout him. This is a fun and classic anime that may remind viewers of Yu-Gi-Oh with its character dynamics (especially between Sena, Suzuna, Yoichi, and Kurita) and perhaps also of One Punch Man with its character designs due to the creator of the famous gag manga, Yusuke Murata, illustrated Eyeshield 21’s original manga, which was written by Riichiro Inagaki. It is readily available on Crunchyroll but only in its original Japanese version with English subtitles, as though an English dub was produced for Toonami Jetstream back in 2007, but the service was shut down before the dub could be completed. It is still an amazing watch today if you want a crazy and insanely hilarious football anime. A reboot may be coming soon, as a short along with a one-shot manga based on the series was released in June of last year.

Whether you’re rooting for the Chiefs, the 49ers, or just the commercials, hopefully, these five sports anime will get you pumped for what is certainly going to be an intense day of television. Nerd culture and sports don’t often go hand in hand, but with anime, it’s almost like a match made in heaven…for the most part. If you need some more sports excitement in your life or just want to see what all the fuss is about, go watch a sports anime!

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