The premise of Blue Lock is that a national soccer training program is instated in which a bunch of the nation's best young male soccer players are trapped inside a facility that treats them like prisoners, withholding basic rights and amenities unless they prove that they’re better than everyone else at soccer by trusting no one and prioritizing themselves rather than working as a team. Players slowly get eliminated until only the best remains, and if you get eliminated, you are banned from soccer forever and your career is over.
That is batshit insane. It sounds like an absolute nightmare of a setting that can only be used to tell a horror story satirizing certain philosophical and political ideologies. But somehow, it's not; it's presented as The Way To Win Soccer. But let's put a pin in that. First, let's look at this absolute inane setting for a sports anime and ask the obvious question: why?
Well you see, it's because Big Soccer is convinced that the reason Japan hasn't won the world cup is because everyone is too focused on teamwork when what they really need is the best striker ever who only cares about his own glory and winning, because the striker is the most important role and the team exists to back him. The purpose of this program is to simultaneously train Japan's best striker and weed out all of the other people who are not Japan's best striker and as such are effectively worthless.
This is accomplished by having all of the characters act as strikers and run an internal competition of who can score the most goals individually, because the real winners aren’t those on the winning team, but those who scored the most goals out of their team, regardless of if your team won or not. They’re motivated to work against their teammates to score more individual goals by rewarding those goals with privileges such as nutritious food, a bed to sleep on, and contact with your family. The goal isn't really to get better at playing soccer (because in order to do that you need to see your teammates as equals), but rather to get better at being the best striker alone by yourself, because then the rest of the team will just have to follow your lead. Teamwork makes the dream work but only when the team are not equals and act under the guidance of the singular best guy. Yes, this plan is how you win soccer and it’s going to train the single guy who will single handedly win the world cup for Japan.
Now, I may have spent my high school years in the school's auditorium rather than on the field, but even I know that not only is that not how soccer works, but the game would fall apart if people tried to play it that way. The author really said "you know that team sport where the entire point is working as a team and that's always how it has been and there are eleven players who all have different jobs to do for a reason? Actually it's a load of bullshit and the striker is the only important role and it always has been, so he should do whatever he wants forever and all of the other roles are for losers" This makes no sense if you think about it for more than three seconds. The goal of soccer in Blue Lock is not to win soccer—not really. It’s to be better than other people. And that is an insane goal to have in your show about a team sport.
Now it's time to take that pin out. While the man in charge of this program is presented in a creepy manner, he is also presented as being right. The show has such a grim, mean, violent tone, but rather than playing it for horror and using it to satirize the ideas it presents (such as our society placing one's worth only on their ability to achieve, how the people in power got there by throwing other people under the bus, and how it claims the only reason you have failed is because you didn’t work hard enough), it presents this excessively heavy tone of pain and suffering as beneficial and character-building.
You were put in an unfair situation that it would have been near-impossible to escape from because you were given an incredibly short amount of time? Well that’s your fault! Here are all of the ways you could have escaped from it but didn't—broken down in detail to show that I am right—and the reason you failed is because you didn't work hard enough, so your entire career is over. You are also the one character who was criticizing my ideas because you, as a sane normal soccer player, value teamwork. I am the one who knows how to actually win soccer, and the next 23 episodes are all going to be people getting better at soccer using my backwards, anti-teamwork, hard-work-fallacy endorsing ideas.
I think my least favorite example of this deeply flawed and illogical ideology is the fact that, as it is presented, the stronger players are given better living conditions, training facilities, and food, and the weaker players are told that if they want to live in those same comfortable conditions, they have to work hard to achieve them. This is bullshit, because in reality, giving the strong players better conditions just makes them stronger, and giving the weaker players worse conditions just makes them worse. It’s actually more complicated than that but I don’t want to mark this review as a spoiler. All that matters is that Blue Lock endorses this idea. The weak players are told they just have to work hard to advance upward so they can live in good conditions, as if the truth of that situation wouldn’t lead to the lack of those good conditions making it impossible to advance. Hmmm…I wonder what this reminds you of?
Just keep pulling on those cleat laces, I guess—just like one of the best strikers in the world who rose out of poverty just by working really hard at soccer!
I don’t even buy the yaoibait team camaraderie it’s trying push so it can masquerade as a sports anime; the blue lock program discourages teamwork by rewarding the players who score the most goals with access to basic rights, and it is making them all work toward the goal of being the singular person to graduate the program with their career still intact because they were better than every other player including all of their previous teammates. I do not buy a friendship formed by encouraging a fellow player to overcome his career ending injury when his motivation for overcoming it is “so I can be better than everyone else.”
I can’t believe in any of these friendships, the inspiring kind where they encourage each other not to give up and celebrate as a team when they win, when this show also includes members of the team double-crossing each other for their own individual goals—which the program encourages because they think soccer is best won when led by a striker who prioritizes his glory over all else. The lunatic running this program explicitly says that one’s individual goals are all that matters, and he as such rewards the teammate that betrayed them. The characters overcome this struggle not by protesting the unfair system, but just by working harder. Then the episode ends with them talking about how awesome it is to live in fear because it makes them stronger.
The blue lock institute aims to breed fear in the hearts of its players—fear of having their lives ruined because they failed at their career—with the man in charge very explicitly saying that their players are failing because they were never taught to associate success with survival, so blue lock is here to reeducate them. And the players proudly say that they are glad they operate under fear because it leads them to success. According to Blue Lock, it is a good thing to live in fear of your own survival because it is the only true motivator to succeed, and that’s terrifying.
Early on in the show, the question is asked: “is it worth it to ruin the lives of 299 athletes just for the sake of one?”
The response?:
“Ruin their lives? Why shouldn’t we? It’s what we need to move forward!”
And that, I think, sums up the inherent flaw that is Blue Lock’s design.
Blue Lock is a highly inaccurate and laughable portrayal of soccer used to push the idea that in this messed up world, one should only think about themself and never care for others, because that's the only way to accomplish your goals, and if you cannot do it then the only explanation is that you did not work hard enough. And living like this is good, because it makes you stronger. The sheer horror of the blue lock program would be perfect for criticizing the individualist mindset, but rather it drives it home as true.
But the reality is that it isn’t true in the slightest. Historically, every time society has operated under this logic, it has failed. The earliest sign of civilization is a healed femur.
The author of Blue Lock not only doesn't know how soccer works, but he doesn't know how the world works either.
