Vegalta Sendai Youth

Vegalta Sendai Youth is the under-18 team of Vegalta Sendai, the J.League club of Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture, and in 2026 it is playing its first season in the Premier League. That is a bigger step than it sounds. Football in Tohoku, the six prefectures of northern Honshu, has long been dominated by school teams — Aomori Yamada above all, with Shoshi in Fukushima close behind — and the best local teenagers have tended to go to them. Sendai is the first J.League club academy from the region to reach the top division. It got there by beating the play-off in December 2025, a few months after reaching the final of the Japan Club Youth Championship.

Miyagi · head coach KATO Nozomu

2026 season

Currently 10th in the Premier League EAST with 13 points from 14 matches (3W 4D 7L, 14-37). Updated daily.

Playing style

Under KATO Nozomu the team presses from the front as a unit and tries to move the ball forward quickly once it wins it back. The coaching is described by the club as patient rather than spectacular: there is no shortcut in developing teenagers, and the academy says its first aim is to produce people who will do well in life, with professional footballers as one result of that rather than the only one. Care of the training ground and equipment, and how players behave off the pitch, are treated as part of the programme.

Honours

Competition	Year	Notes
Premier League play-off	2025	Promoted for the first time
Japan Club Youth (U-18) Championship	2025, runners-up	0-3 to Kashima Antlers Youth
J Youth Cup	3rd, 2025
Prince League Tohoku	2016	Runners-up in 2025
Tohoku Club Youth Championship	5 titles	2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

The 2025 Club Youth final is the club's best result in a national competition at this age. Kashima, who beat them, went on to win the national Premier League title that December.

History

Before the J.League — The club grows out of the football team of Tohoku Electric Power, a regional company side, and becomes Vegalta Sendai in the 1990s.
2000s — A long period in which the academy produces almost no first-team players. Talent from the region goes either to clubs around Tokyo or to the big school teams.
2010s — The academy rebuilds around two ideas: that the club's own football schools should feed a single pathway from under-12 to under-18, and that players should be developed as people first.
2016 — Prince League Tohoku champions, the first of five regional Club Youth titles in six years.
2024 — YOKOYAMA Sota is promoted to the first team.
2025 — Runners-up in the Club Youth Championship and third in the J Youth Cup, then promotion to the Premier League through the play-off. FURUYA Ayumu and NAGAI Taiga are promoted to the first team for 2026.
2026 — The first Premier League season. NAGAI is called up by Japan's under-19s for the Maurice Revello Tournament in France.

Development pathway

A target for the first team. The club has set itself a public goal of producing ten first-team players from the academy in ten years, and an aspiration that half the first-team squad should one day be homegrown. Promotions since 2024 have come faster than that target.
A wide base in Miyagi. The club runs football schools across the prefecture that feed its junior and junior-youth teams, so that the players who reach the under-18s have usually been in the system for years. Most of the 2026 squad came up through the club's own junior-youth team.
Mixing the age groups. Regular sessions bring players from different academy teams onto the same pitch, and first-team goalkeepers coach the academy goalkeepers directly several times a year.
A pitch that works in winter. Snow and frozen ground have always been the region's handicap. The academy now trains on a natural-grass ground on a university campus in the north of Sendai, which can be used through the year.

Former players

FURUYA Ayumu (forward, Vegalta Sendai) — from Tokyo, joined the youth team in 2023, top scorer in Prince League Tohoku as a second-year, scored three goals on the way to the 2025 Club Youth final, and was promoted to the first team for 2026.
NAGAI Taiga (defender, Vegalta Sendai) — a 185cm centre-back who joined from a junior-youth club in Yamagata, promoted in 2026 and selected for Japan's under-19 squad at the 2026 Maurice Revello Tournament.
YOKOYAMA Sota (midfielder, Vegalta Sendai) — from Hokkaido, promoted to the first team in 2024.
KUDO Aoi (midfielder, Vegalta Sendai) — born in Sendai, through the club's junior, junior-youth and youth teams, then university, then back to the first team in 2023.
HOTTA Daiki (goalkeeper, Vegalta Sendai) — a Sendai academy graduate who went to university and played for several other clubs before returning in 2025 to wear the number 1.

Players to watch in 2026

Players worth knowing in the 2026 season:

ISHIYAMA Haru (midfielder, third year, no. 4) — the centre of the midfield, and has played every minute of the league season.
SASAKI Ryo (forward, third year, no. 9) and OYAMA Shinji (forward, third year, no. 10) — joint top scorers with four league goals each.
KIKUCHI Kosei (midfielder, third year, no. 8) — scored the club's first Premier League goal, and came from a junior-high-school team in Tono, Iwate.
ABE Sora (midfielder, second year, no. 24) — scored the winner for the club's first Premier League victory, against Yokohama FC Youth.
WATANABE Kosei (goalkeeper, third year, no. 12) — recruited from Aomori FC's junior-youth team.
YARIMIZU Ouga (defender, second year, no. 15) — has played every minute of the league season.
ABE Mihiro (midfielder, second year, no. 28) and KAI Kyotaro (midfielder, second year, no. 17) — second-years with a regular place.
YAMASHITA Soji (no. 29) and OZAWA Shunta (no. 40) — first-year midfielders who have already scored in the Premier League.

Two junior-high-school players are also registered with the squad.

Notes

Full profile in Japanese, with the current squad list and every result: ベガルタ仙台ユース.

Where a player has no official English spelling published by the JFA or the J.League, the name is shown in Japanese.