All Japan High School Soccer Tournament 2026–27

What the tournament is

First played in 1918, the tournament is older than the J.League by three-quarters of a century. It has been organised by the Japan Football Association together with 43 commercial TV broadcasters, so every prefecture's qualifier has its own local coverage and the later rounds are shown nationwide.

Only school teams can enter. The U-18 academies of J.League clubs — which play against schools every week in the Premier and Prince Leagues — are not eligible; they have a separate Club Youth Championship. That makes this the one national stage where school football is on its own.

For third-year students it is the last tournament of their school career. Many of them have already agreed to join a J.League club or a university team in April.

The 2026–27 tournament

In the 2025–26 edition, matches up to the quarter-finals lasted 80 minutes and the semi-finals and final 90 minutes. Only the final had extra time; every other drawn match went straight to a penalty shoot-out. The draw and the venue for each round are announced by the organisers later in the autumn.

Storylines

• The holders: Kamimura Gakuen (Kagoshima) beat Kashima Gakuen 3-0 in the 2025–26 final to win the tournament for the first time, completing a summer–winter double with the Inter-High.
• The summer champions: Shizuoka Gakuen won the 2026 Inter-High. They have won this tournament twice, in 1995–96 (shared) and 2019–20.
• The most successful school of the last decade: Aomori Yamada, with four titles since 2016–17.

Qualifying in all 47 prefectures

Each prefecture runs its own knockout qualifier, mostly between August and mid-November. Only the winner goes through — in Tokyo, the winners of two separate blocks. Large prefectures such as Tokyo, Kanagawa and Chiba play more than 100 qualifying matches, starting with a preliminary stage, while the strongest teams are seeded into the later rounds.

Even the schools in the national Premier League have to win their prefecture first, and every year some of them are knocked out by local rivals. The table below shows how far each qualifier has got, the date of its final and, once it has been played, the school that qualified. Prefecture names link to our Japanese pages with the full bracket.

Recent winners

Every winner since 2008–09, in Japanese: 選手権 歴代優勝校一覧.

Notes

Status and qualified schools are read every morning from the prefectural brackets on our Japanese pages. School names appear in Japanese until we have confirmed the school’s own English spelling.

The same page in Japanese, with every prefectural bracket: 選手権2026（第105回）.

See also: Inter-High 2026 (the summer tournament), how youth football works in Japan and Premier League standings.