Blue Lock Anime: Release Date, Trailer, Plot, Cast & More

Blue Lock is a Japanese manga series. Focusing on the sports genre, specifically football, the series is set after the results of the Japan soccer team after the 2018 World Cup. On August 12, 2021, an anime adaptation produced by 8-Bit was announced. In this article, we are going to tell you everything about the upcoming anime series, when will Blue Lock anime be released, you can check out its trailer and find out more about the plot, cast and even some more info about the upcoming anime.

Blue Lock anime is set to be released on October 8. It was confirmed on August 12, 2021. The series is going to be produced by 8-Bit and directed by Tetsuaki Watanabe, with Shunsuke Ishikawa serving as assistant director.

The rest of this article is going to bring you all the known and unknown information related to the upcoming first season of Blue Lock. You’re going to find out about its potential release date, whether there is a trailer, what the story could be about, and much more about this intriguing new football anime series.

Blue Lock release date

The series began as a manga whose serialization in Kōdansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine started on August 1, 2018. The series went on hiatus at the beginning of October 2021 due to some health problems of the author and resumed on the 27th of the same month. The first tankōbon volume was released in Japan on November 16, 2018, and since then, a total of 17 volumes have been released.

The series was recommended by Attack on Titan author Hajime Isayama, for whom Yusuke Nomura previously worked as an assistant. Blue Lock was one of the top 3 sports manga series of the “2020 National Bookstore Employees Recommended Comics” by Honya Club. The publication also won the 45th Kōdansha Manga Award in the shōnen category in 2021.

With the publication of the 13th volume, Blue Lock had a total of 3.6 million copies sold. Rebecca Silverman of Anime News Network, in her review of the first two volumes of the series, called the concept of “dystopian sports” something that makes Blue Lock stand out among other sports series, but also said that it is so “blatantly absurd that It doesn’t work at all.”

Silverman praised the series for its art, noting Tite Kubo’s nuances, concluding that while its first two volumes aren’t perfect, there is enough to make you want to read more.

An anime television series adaptation of Blue Lock was announced on August 12, 2021. The series is going to be produced by 8-Bit and directed by Tetsuaki Watanabe, with Shunsuke Ishikawa serving as assistant director, Taku Kishimoto supervising series scripts, Masaru Shindō providing the main character designs and serving as chief animation director, Hisashi Tojima as chief action director, and Jun Murayama composing the music.

UPDATE August, 12

We now finally have the release date for Blue Lock, which will premiere on October 8. You can check out the confirmation in the trailer below.

Blue Lock trailer

Now that you know everything about the upcoming adaptation of Blue Lock, we can tell you at this moment that a trailer is present, but it’s only a very short preview trailer that does not reveal very much about the upcoming adaptation. This video was initially released along with the announcement of an adaptation, and you can check it out yourselves:

A proper trailer is bound to appear sometime during the year, quite possibly when we get a confirmation of the exact release date for the Blue Lock series. Until then, this PV trailer is the only thing we have related to this exciting new soccer series.

UPDATE August, 12

A new trailer for Blue Lock anime has just arrived and you can check it out below. It also reveals a release date for the anime. Check it out below.

Blue Lock plot

When Japan is defeated by Belgium at the World Cup in Russia, once again missing the opportunity to enter the quarter-finals of the World Cup, JFA manager Anri Teieri realizes that Japan’s football is no longer able to make progress because her colleagues are only interested in mere economic profit, while you would like Japan to win the World Cup.

She, therefore, approved the “Blue Lock” project directed by Jinpachi Ego, with the aim of selecting 300 of the best Japanese footballers from the high school leagues and taking them to a special academy. Among the selected is Yoichi Isagi, who lost the qualifying match of the high school national championship having not had the courage to score the equalizer, preferring to pass the ball to a less talented teammate than him who failed miserably.

At Blue Lock, which aims to transform one of the 300 young athletes into the strongest forward in the world who will lead Japan to football glory, Isagi will seek to emerge in a competitive environment, between advanced technologies and formidable rivals.

In the first stage of their project, Ego and Teieri aim for the first historic victory of the Under-20 World Cup, and to bring the best Blue Lock players to the field in the team named Blue Lock Eleven, in which Isagi also finds a place, against the formation Japan Under-20 official; in case of victory, the Blue Lock players will represent Japan at the Under-20 World Cup.

Blue Lock cast

At this moment, we don’t know a lot about the cast behind Blue Lock. We know some names, but we’ll just have to wait a bit for the other voice actors to be revealed. Luckily for you, we have a list of anticipated characters so we’ll be filling it with new information once they become available. Here are the characters we expect to see in Blue Lock:

• Yoichi Isagi is a second-year student. He played as a striker on the Ichinan High School football team. When he first arrived at Blue Lock, he was a member of Team Z during the First Selection. His main goal is to become the best striker in the world. This is the protagonist. He is voiced by Kazuki Ura.
• Ryōsuke Kirais a striker who plays for Matsukaze Kokuō; he was also invited to Blue Lock.
• Meguru Bachira is a temperamental striker who plays by following his instincts. When he arrived at Blue Lock, he was a member of Team Z during the First Selection. His goal was to find rivals to play against who also have a “monster” in them. He dreams of becoming the best striker in the world. He is voiced by Tasuku Kaito.
• Rensuke Kunigami is a hot-headed striker whose goal is to become a soccer superhero. When he arrived at Blue Lock, he was a member of the Z team during the first selection. He is voiced by Yūki Ono.
• Hyoma Chigiri is a prodigy striker. He wants to become the best striker in the world like his rivals. He is voiced by Sōma Saitō
• Shōei Barō is a member of Team X when first selected at Blue Lock.
• Seishiro Nagi is a member of Blue Lock. His goal is to play football and continue to find worthy opponents to satisfy his curiosity and test his ever-growing skills. In high school, Nagi was a solitary student. He starts playing football following his meeting with his friend, Reo Mikage.
• Rin Itoshi is Sae Itoshi’s younger brother and started playing soccer with him. Rin played as a striker in all the teams he was in, always being one of the best players. This is the deuteragonist.
• Reo Mikage is the heir of the Mikage Corporation, whose total fortune is estimated at 705.8 billion yen. Before entering Blue Lock, he was a student at an elite high school, where he met his first longtime friend, Seishiro Nagi. He started playing football with him soon after. Being a young man who has everything going for him, his one and only desire is to win the FIFA World Cup.
• Jingo Raichi is a Japanese soccer striker. Upon arriving at Blue Lock, Raichi was a member of Team Z during the First Selection.
• Wataru Kuon is a Japanese soccer player who plays as a center-forward. When he arrived at Blue Lock, he was a member of Team Z, where he was the main strategist.
• Okuhito Iemon is a Japanese striker. When he arrived at Blue Lock, he was a member of Team Z and played as a goalie.

As for the crew, if you’re interesting, here are the names behind this new soccer anime:

Director: Tetsuaki Watanabe
Character Design: Masaru Shindō
Music: Jun Murayama
Prop Design: Hisashi Higashijima, Yuri Nakajima, Kaori Kyōzu
Special Effects Animation Director: Akane
Color Key Artist: Sakura Komatsu
Art Design: Shinji Sugiyama
Art Director: Sawako Takagi
Backgrounds: Studio Wyeth
Composing Director of Photography: Yoshihiro Asagi
Photography: Chiptune
3D CG Director: Norimitsu Hirosawa
3D CG: Aura Studio
Visual Concept: Toshiyuki Yamashita (Hyperbole)
Special Effects Processing: Toshiyuki Yamashita, Rina Mitsuzumi
2D CG Monitor Graphics: Yasukazu Asano (Emitai)
Editing: Mai Hasegawa (EditZ)
Sound Director: Fumiyuki Go
Sound Producer: Bit Grooove Promotion
Animation Producer: Tsutomu Hirano

Where to watch Blue Lock?

At this moment, as expected, there is no means of watching Blue Lock, as there is no season two of Blue Lock to watch. Since the first season has yet to come out, even in Japan, we don’t really know where it will be available for streaming. Knowing how things work, though, we assume that Crunchyroll is going to pick up this show, just how it did with numerous other ones in history.

Will there be a Blue Lock Season 2?

The future of Blue Lock is, as of this moment, unknown. At this moment, we don’t really know much about the first season, so whether we’ll be seeing a second season or not is still unknown. If the show does good, and with all the currently available anime content, Blue Lock could be a likely candidate for a renewal, but the fact that we do not know anything about the series’ success (or failure) makes the future very, very uncertain at this period.