Tom Byer: How an American Grassroots Coach Paved the Way for Japan’s Soccer Revolution

Tom Byer (Photo by 343coaching.com)

Today, Japan is widely recognized as one of the best soccer teams on the entire planet. Ranked by FIFA as the 15th-best team in men’s soccer, Japan has confirmed its status as the continent’s dominant force by winning the AFC Asian Cup in 1992, 2000, 2004, and 2011, qualifying for each of the last seven World Cups, reaching the knockout round in three of the last four editions, and boasting a roster of players who are playing at Europe’s biggest clubs. However, it wasn’t always long ago that soccer was a mere afterthought in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Back in the mid-1980s, soccer lagged behind baseball and sumo in the pantheon of Japan’s most popular sports. The Samurai Blue had never even qualified for an Asian Cup, let alone a World Cup, and their sole major trophies were bronze medals from the 1968 Olympic Games and the 1951 and 1966 Asian Games. They needed someone with the foresight and ingenuity to transform soccer into a source of passion for millions of children, someone who could plant the seeds for short-term success and long-term prosperity, someone who could change the course of Japanese soccer forever.

Enter: Tom Byer.

From New York to a New Life Abroad

Byer was born on November 21, 1960, in the Bronx but moved to upstate New York shortly after, where he quickly became enamored with soccer. He emerged as a vital player for his high school team, winning the county championship three times and being voted as the best player in the entire league before taking his talents to Ulster County Community College, which had recently won back-to-back national championships and produced the #1 pick in the North American Soccer League draft. Byer broke the mold by becoming one of the first locals to crack Ulster’s star-studded squad, and after impressing at the junior college level, Byer drew the attention of the University of Baltimore, which offered him a full athletic scholarship. He signed a letter of intent to play for Baltimore, only to pull a U-turn and commit to the University of South Florida.

“When I was 12, my family moved to Florida for a year, and I was coached by someone who went to the University of South Florida and who was a great player, a German by the name of Norbert Müller,” stated Byer in an exclusive RG interview. “Me and my U-13 team used to sneak over the fence at night and practice at the college, and I just fell in love with that college and the smell of the Bermuda grass. Everyone thought I was crazy to decline a full ride, but I wanted to go to South Florida.”

As per collegiate rules, Byer had to sit out a year after reneging on his move to Maryland. Rather than stick around in the USA, he decided to spend a year in England, where he played for amateur side Leiston FC on the weekends and lived with his brother, who was stationed with the Air Force. After graduating from South Florida, Byer entered an American soccer landscape that was becoming more and more dilapidated by the minute. In the words of ex-USMNT international Janusz Michallik: “It was all over the place…you didn’t know where the next check was coming from, or if it was coming at all. In those days, if you got a check from your team, you’d go straight to the bank and cash it…If you waited a few days, you might come up empty-handed.”

It’s why, in 1986, Byer moved halfway across the world and joined the Japanese side Hitachi SC, becoming the first American to play soccer in Asia. With foreign players being unable to play for the first team, Byer registered and trained with the first team but only played for their reserves before eventually hanging up his boots in 1989. Rather than returning home, he chose to remain in Japan and stake out a career in coaching.

“By the time I was a teenager, I really wanted to be a professional player or coach. Once I made that decision, all my energy, time, and focus went into that—I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I always wanted to get into coaching ever since I was a young guy because I worked at some soccer camps for George Visvari, who coached Ulster County from 1968 to 2010. I loved the camaraderie of being around the other coaches and meeting people from different cultures…that was just a really big thrill for me, and I got the bug.”

Building a Legacy in the Far East

In order to keep himself above water, Byer would balance part-time coaching with dialing up major Japanese companies and asking them if they’d like to sponsor his coaching clinics. Eventually, he met a student at an international school who informed him that his father worked at the Swiss multinational conglomerate Nestlé. After returning to Tokyo, Byer tracked down his phone number in the phone book and spoke to him; he just so happened to be the highest-ranking Nestlé official in Japan. One week later, Byer signed a contract with Nestlé, which agreed to sponsor 50 clinics in a yearlong, nationwide tour – in return, he would distribute samples of Nestlé’s powdered chocolate malt beverage Milo during each session. Just like that, Byer was able to get his foot in the door and secure much-needed funding to take his project to the next level. Every weekend, Byer and four other coaches would pile into a minivan, drive to a different city in Japan, and educate Japanese children on how to improve their technical skills – little did he know it, but he’d soon be making an impression on various future Japanese internationals from Shinji Kagawa to Takumi Minamino to Keisuke Honda.

“I spent 10 years doing events in all of Japan’s 47 prefectures, and there were some events where it was almost like the circus was coming to town,” reminisces Byer.

“We didn’t just show up, we did everything, which was great for me because to this day, I know the nuts and bolts on how to put on an event better than most people. We arrived before the event started and set up the posters and mixed the Milo powder with the milk in these big tanks, we’d speak to the soccer associations to make sure the kids were coming, and after the event was done, we’d take everything down and wait for our truck to pick our stuff up and send it back to Tokyo, before doing all the billings to Nestlé.”

“That was a very good experience for me for my overall career, because I went on to work with a lot of different brands, so it gave me a skillset that most players or coaches would never have. To this day, I have always negotiated my own deals with the biggest brands in the world, like Adidas, Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza, and AIA. I create strategies for countries on how to develop players, and I can bring all that experience with me, but if you don’t know how to get it out to the masses, then obviously you’re not going to be able to maximize its potential.”

Bolstered by Nestlé’s investment, Byer’s two-hour grassroots clinics spread like wildfire across Japan, with children turning out in droves to witness his eye-catching juggling skills and absorb his unique coaching methods. In 1993, Byer opened his first soccer school, which has since grown to 150 different campuses with over 20,000 students. And that same year, English coach Paul Mariner introduced Byer to the ‘Coerver Method.’ Instead of having children play against each other in an actual soccer match, Dutchman Wiel Coerver’s philosophy prioritized step overs, body feints, rolling the ball with the sole of one’s foot, and other ways of ball control. Byer spent 14 years leading the Coerver Coaching Program before starting his own T3 academy in 2008, which focused on not just training clinics but also developing multimedia platforms. In total, Byer has conducted roughly 2,000 events for 500,000 children.

It wasn’t long before the seeds of Byer’s work began to bear fruit. In 1997, Japan qualified for their first-ever World Cup – they’ve qualified for every one since then – prompting German sportswear magnate Adidas to fly Byer out to Marseille for the World Cup draw and present him with the Golden Boot award in recognition of his efforts with grassroots soccer – to this day, he is the only youth soccer coach to receive this prestigious honor. Five years later, Byer presented the World Cup Adidas Golden Ball and Golden Boot unveiling and talk show to the worldwide media alongside the last three World Cup-winning managers in Franz Beckenbauer, Aime Jacquet, and Carlos Alberto Parreira.

“The impact we had was big, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t want to take all the credit, but we played a massive role because of the schools and especially with this crop of players like Wataru Endo (Liverpool), Takumi Minamino (Monaco) and Reo Hatate (Celtic), who came from our schools. The biggest difference between when I first came here 40 years ago and today is that we had very good players back then, but the elite player pool hadn’t exploded like it has today.”

“When we used to watch the national team play in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we knew who the good players were, but we’d be worried that the level would drop whenever they had to be replaced by bench players…now it’s the opposite, we’re asking why this player who’s on the bench isn’t starting. When you can close that gap between the very best and the worst, that’s when your elite player pool explodes. The gap between the Japanese boys playing in Europe on top teams and the Japanese players in the J-League is very small, whereas the gap between the Americans that play in the MLS and the ones that play in Europe is like the Pacific Ocean.”

Laying the Foundations for Japan’s Soccer Success

In order to stir up excitement for the 2002 FIFA World Cup held in Japan and South Korea, the broadcasters at Tokyo TV and ShoPro decided to add a two-minute soccer spot to Oha Suta, the top-rated children’s morning television show in Japan, and they had zero doubts about who the host should be. Byer was no longer going to be preaching his methodology to hundreds or thousands of Japanese kids, but to between 3 to 5 million viewers every single day from April 1998 to December 2010. What’s more, he was given a two-page panel in Japan’s biggest children’s manga comic book – KoroKoro Komikku – which boasts a circulation of over 1 million, and a two-page corner for Soccer Digest, Japan’s biggest soccer magazine. Byer has also sold over 50,000 copies of his various books as well as 20,000+ copies of his DVDs like “Tomsan’s Soccer Techniques.”

Thanks to Byer’s far-reaching, multimedia approach, boys and girls across Japan were getting hooked on soccer and taking the time out of their day to practice their juggling and ball control skills on their own. Suddenly, sumo and baseball weren’t the most popular sports in Japan: soccer was. Make no mistake; there have been various factors behind Japan’s soccer rise over the past three decades, from the launch of the J-League to the arrival of big-name stars like Gary Lineker and Zico, but none have had a bigger impact than Byer.

In a biological sense, Byer has two sons – Kaito (16) and Sho (19). In a soccer sense, he has millions of sons and daughters. Countless players like Keisuke Honda and Shinji Kagawa grew up reading Byer’s manga strips and watching his television shows or VHS tapes before going out into the real world and practicing their skills and eventually earning transfers to the biggest clubs in Europe. Whenever he’d put on a demonstration, there would be hordes of boys and girls lining up for an autograph or a handshake. And when Zinedine Zidane, one of the greatest players of all time, attended a Tokyo coaching clinic in 2009, he was drowned out by the raucous cheers for ‘Tom-san’ or ‘Mr. Tom’. It wasn’t Zidane – winner of the Ballon d’Or, the UEFA Champions League , and the FIFA World Cup – who was the center of attention, but a journeyman player who never even managed to play at the top level of American or Japanese soccer and who retired at 28 due to injury.

Two years later, Japan reached the FIFA Women’s World Cup Final, with Alex Morgan opening the scoring for the USA. The Stars and Stripes looked headed for victory until the 81st minute when Aya Miyama, who grew up attending Byer’s coaching clinics and academies, equalized to force extra time. The match eventually went to penalties, where Japan prevailed 3-1 to become the first-ever Asian team to win a senior World Cup.

Byer hasn’t just worked with millions of children in Japan, but with kids in other countries like China, Indonesia, and Australia. However, he hasn’t quite been able to yield the same results in his motherland. In 2017, Byer conducted a pilot program in Seattle predicated upon his Football Starts At Home philosophy, which is targeted at kids between the ages of 2 and 6. Prioritizing technique over tactics, Football Starts at Home encourages parents to work with their children and commit to spending five minutes per day practicing four basic drills – roll, slide, tic-tac , and v’s – and it also discourages them from practicing passing, shooting, and kicking. Funded with $75,000 from U.S. Soccer and $25,000 from the Washington Youth Soccer Association, Byer had hoped to expand his program across the entire nation, only for the departure of US Soccer president Sunil Gulati and subsequent arrival of Carlos Cordeiro to cause the federation to withdraw funding after its six-month contract expired (Gulati declined to comment when approached).

Japan became the first country to book their ticket for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be held in the United States, Mexico , and Canada, whilst Argentina, New Zealand , and Iran followed in their footsteps by qualifying for the tournament. A total of 48 teams will be competing to lift the trophy in East Rutherford, New Jersey, roughly 16 miles away from Byer’s birthplace, and after beating two former champions in Germany and Spain in the previous edition, Japan will be looking to make an even deeper run in North America. If the Samurai Blue are to become the first Asian team to reach a male World Cup Final, it’ll be thanks in large part to an American who, over the past four decades, has transformed Japan from a footballing backwater to a footballing powerhouse.