The Team Formation Arc

Lore & Background

Ryusei Academy's football program is, at the start of the series, a footnote in the school's athletic hierarchy. The sport itself is niche in the Japanese high-school landscape, and the Devils are mocked by peers, overlooked by the administration, and staffed with a patchwork of players who ended up in the wrong locker room. There is no tradition of dominance, no legacy of trophies, no coach with a legendary playbook. What there is, instead, is a small group of kids who are either too proud, too scared, too big, or too weird to fit anywhere else—and football, for reasons none of them fully articulate, is where they land.

Sena's arrival is the catalyst. He is not the strongest, not the most charismatic, not the one who yells the loudest in the locker room. He is small, quiet, and perpetually on the verge of apologizing for existing. But the moment he sprints down a field, the air around him seems to change. His speed is not just fast; it is the kind of speed that makes defenders question their own legs. The team's quarterback, a sharp-eyed strategic mind, recognizes immediately that Sena is not just another running back—he is a weapon that changes the geometry of every play. Building the roster around that single, electrifying truth becomes the arc's central creative challenge.

The broader world of Eyeshield 21 treats high-school football with a seriousness that borders on mythology. Games are played in packed stadiums, rival schools have decades of tradition, and a single loss can define a team's reputation for a generation. Against that backdrop, a newly formed squad of teenagers with barely a season of experience is, by any rational measure, out of their depth. The Team Formation Arc earns its tension not from spectacle but from the quiet, grinding work of learning to trust each other, to run the same route at the same speed, to believe that the plan will work when the whistle blows.

In Their Own Story

The practice field is empty except for the late afternoon sun dragging long shadows across the turf. Sena stands at the top of the formation, hands on his knees, breathing hard. He can hear the distant thud of the practice pads from the other field, the muffled roar of a team that has been together for years. He has been here for maybe three weeks. He still flinches when the linemen snap the ball. But the QB's voice cuts through the wind, calm and precise, counting down the cadence. Sena's eyes drop to the line. He can see the gap. He has always been able to see the gap. The snap echoes. The line crashes forward. And for one suspended, golden second, the world narrows to nothing but the space between two bodies and the sound of his own cleats biting the dirt. Then he is gone, and the only thing left in the lane is a faint swirl of grass and the stunned silence of a defender who just lost a race he didn't know he was running.

Reader's Guide

Okay, so picture this: you're a small, anxious kid who runs like the ground is personally offended by your existence, and some genius QB with a playbook in his head says, "You're on the team now." That's basically the whole pitch, and it is GLORIOUS.

The setup is pure underdog. The Devils are a joke at Ryusei Academy. The roster is a mishmash of guys who don't belong anywhere else. Practices are chaotic. Plays fall apart. You watch Sena apologize to a water bottle and you think, "This team is never going to be anything." Oh no, right? Wrong.

Then the QB starts wiring the offense around Sena's speed, and suddenly every route, every block, every fake has a purpose. The team stops being a collection of individuals and starts being a machine. You feel the chemistry click in small moments—a nod before the snap, a hand on the shoulder, a shared grin after a rep that finally works.

The first real game is where the "oh YES" hits. The Devils are outmanned, out-muscled, out-everything. But they run. They actually run. And when Sena breaks free and the stadium goes silent, you are on your feet, screaming, because a team that was a footnote three chapters ago just put points on the board.

By the end of the arc, the dynamics have shifted completely. Sena is no longer the kid who apologizes. The team has an identity. And every rival school that heard the name "Devils" and laughed is suddenly, quietly, checking their game schedule. The foundation is laid. The engine is running. And the rest of the series is just the throttle going to the floor.

Did You Know?

• Eyeshield 21's art is drawn by Yusuke Murata, the same artist behind One Punch Man, giving the football action a level of dynamic, panel-bursting energy that is rare in the sports manga genre.
• Sena Kobayakawa's defining trait—his extraordinary sprinting speed—is established in the very first chapters and becomes the single tactical pillar the entire Devils offense is built around for the rest of the series.
• The manga was serialized in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump, placing it in the same prestigious anthology as titles like Naruto and One Piece, and it ran for several years before concluding.
• The Team Formation Arc deliberately mirrors the structure of a real football season's early weeks: raw practices, broken plays, first scrimmages, and a first game that is less about winning and more about discovering who