His name is Kazuyoshi Miura. He is Japanese and a professional footballer. He plays attacking. He is said to be as skilful and efficient with the right foot as with the left foot. He has 89 caps for the Japanese national team. The last dates back to the early 2000s. Because, it’s a small important detail, Kazuyoshi Miura is 55 years old. It will celebrate its 56th spring at the end of February. He played at Santos in the 1980s alongside Dunga, Sampaio and Socrates and yet Kazuyoshi Miura is still active.
At 55 – and soon to be 56 – “King Kazu”, a professional for 37 years, joins the Oliveirense club (Portuguese D2) on loan from Yokohama (Japan). With this new contract, Miura is preparing to play the 38th season of a professional career that began in 1986, a year before the birth of Lionel Messi. Kazuyoshi Miura is not a gimmicky player, just good to have a trace in the record books. In Japan, the fifties is a star nicknamed “King Kazu”. The Japanese are convinced that it was he who inspired the character of the manga “Captain Tsubasa” known in France under the name of “Olive and Tom”.
This is false since the manga was born before Miura was known but the Japanese do not want to budge. Four-time champion of Japan in the mid-1990s, Miura was voted “Asian player of the year in 1993”. Like the Brazilian “Ballon d’Or 1999” Rivaldo, he also has the rare distinction of having played for a club on four continents: Asia, America, Europe and Oceania. Miura holds another longevity record: in 2017, he became the oldest professional goalscorer in history, supplanting England’s Stanley Matthews at the time. At that time, Miura was 50 years and 14 days old and his record still stands. At his advanced age, Miura, always sharp as a young man, certainly does not run as fast as before.