Fujieda MYFC's 0-1, the 69th-Minute Handball, and the Missing Video Referee in J2

Three seconds in the 69th minute

On 24 October, in Round 13 of the J2 League, Fujieda MYFC were 0-1 down at home to Tokushima Vortis. In the 69th minute, forward Kawamoto Riyo tried to lift the ball over a defender inside the penalty area. The ball struck the defender's arm. The referee gave nothing. Manager Tomoaki Makino ran to the assistant referee, protested, and returned with a yellow card.

What he said in the post-match flash interview was not the usual grievance. He suggested the referee may have adopted a new rule. He said, "I'll say it because no one else will." He said the level is really low, that it harms player development, that it wastes the valuable J.League. This was not anger at one decision. It was a demand for a report card.

Twenty-six years of standing at the touchline and in press boxes has taught me the pattern: managers shout about decisions, and by the following Monday everyone has moved on. Makino is different because he did not use the decision as evidence. He used it as a finger pointed at a system. And while pointing there, he is touching something Japanese football still cannot answer.

Context: a small club, an old club, and a league without a safety net

Fujieda MYFC is a Shizuoka club. The city's scale and the club's budget both sit where J1's media light does not reach. Tokushima Vortis has played in J1, and was the better-resourced side here. A 0-1 home defeat in Round 13 is a bad result; attach a disputed non-decision to it and the frustration multiplies.

Precision matters here. The J.League pyramid runs across J1, J2 and J3, and the whole machinery of promotion and relegation rests on the credibility of results. Results feel credible only when there is a mechanism to check them. J1 has rolled out video review in stages; in J2, to my knowledge, no such permanent safety net exists. That is the figure I always cross-check with the league before publication, because it is the centre of this entire story — and if it is wrong, half the analysis below is wrong too.

Makino's background matters as well. As a former Japan international, his voice carries in the media, and as a manager he is at the stage of his career where every statement is read two ways — as courage, or as an excuse.

Core: the blind spot in the Law, and the decision nobody can overturn

Under IFAB Law 12, the ball striking an arm is an offence only when the arm position is not a justifiable consequence of the player's body movement — when the defender has made the body "unnaturally bigger." A close-range attempt to lift the ball over a defender, met by an extended arm, is exactly the scenario that is most contested and least consistently applied worldwide. I saw this from the mixed zone at the 2026 U-17 World Cup in Delhi, where a security guard asked whether I was a player's wife. That day I noted something down: in a sport whose decisions rest on things that are visible, the real question is always who holds the right to review.

In this case nobody held that right. The on-field decision was final. Makino had no formal route to file a complaint, which is why he took the only route left to a manager — the press conference. The clause was on page nine, and nobody had read page nine: in a competition whose regulations contain no review mechanism, a yellow card means not only discipline but also that you have nothing left with which to speak.

The next question is the cost of what he said. Japanese competition and federation conduct rules have historically been sensitive about public criticism of referees. Phrases like "the level is really low" and "if the standard is not raised, it will break" fall into the category that can attract a fine or a touchline ban. I do not trust any club press release — follow the fax machine, not the press release. Here the fax machine is the referee committee's report, and until that is public, assuming the call was wrong is as incomplete as assuming it was right.

Makino's second argument is the more interesting one, and it is the one that falls out of the headlines. He said weak refereeing affects player development and erodes the league's value. This is a product-quality claim. A league's largest capital investment is its credibility as a competition; the day viewers begin to believe outcomes rest on an unappealable judgement, the foundation of its broadcasting value cracks. By invoking the national team's ambition to become world number one at the World Cup, he lifted the debate from one club to the whole pyramid. It is a big rhetorical move, but the argument is not hollow.

Sitting in India, the case looks familiar. Not because referees are poor in both places, but because both structures throw up the same question — if video assistance is not available in every match, what formal route does a club have, and what is the average outcome of that route. I will not write that number as a claim; I publish it only after verifying it with the league and the federation.

Contrarian: the real question is not whether it was a penalty

For the next fortnight every pundit will be deciding whether the defender's arm was in a natural position. The source contains no video, no referee statement, and Tokushima Vortis is absent from the story entirely. Claiming a conclusion from that is incomplete. Second, Makino's words are rhetorically powerful — so powerful that they appear larger than the evidence one incident generates. Fujieda scored zero goals in 90 minutes; a single penalty appeal does not explain a defeat. If the wave rolls on and the club does not review its own weaknesses, the label waiting for it is "excuse-makers."

But there is a reverse angle. Players cannot criticise referees, because the disciplinary risk lands on them directly. Makino absorbed that risk himself — that is the real meaning of "no one else will say it." It binds a dressing room. And on the day the league fines him, the narrative turns to "they punish the truth-teller, not the mistake," and the damage then belongs not to the club but to the competition.

Takeaway

The result will not change; it stays 0-1. What can change is the referee committee's report and the debate that follows about how far video assistance can be extended in J2. I will be watching three things: the league's disciplinary decision, whether other clubs and managers echo the same complaint, and whether this single incident creates a standard that gets written into next season's regulations. If none of the three happens, Makino will have been right — the standard did not rise, and the system stayed exactly where it stood.