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Tegevajaro Miyazaki is a new addition to the J.League landscape, but the team can trace its roots back all the way to 1965, with the creation of the Kadokawa Club soccer team, in 1965. Kadokawa Club had a pretty uneventful existence in the relatively quiet football backwater of Miyazaki Prefecture, until 2004 when the momentum for creating a J.League club in Miyazaki began to gather pace.
Starting in 2004, the team went through a number of name changes and organizational restructuring. The team was known briefly as "Andiamo Kadokawa 1965", and then "Miyazaki Sportsmen United FC", before finally settling on the name Tegevajaro Miyazki, in 1915. During this period the club merged with a number of other Miyazaki-area football programs, to achieve the scale needed to make a run at the professional ranks.
Like most J.League team names Tegevajaro is an ersatz combination of words smashed together in something that sounds vaguely European. "Tege" is a word that means "amazing" in the local Miyazaki dialect (derived from the standard Japanese word "sugoi"). The remainder - "vajaro" - is said to be a combination of the Spanish words "vaca" (cow) and "pajaro" (chicken), both of which are the focus of major agricultural industries in the region. Reflecting the barnyard concept, Tegevajaro's team emblem features the two animals, along with typically Japanese symbology (a rising sun and a Torii gate).
Following this period of reorganization in the early 2000s, Tegevajaro began the climb from the local league, winning the Miyazaki Prefecture title in 2013 and advancing to the Kyushu Regional League. The signing of former Consadole and Frontale manager Nobuhiro Ishizaki, in 2017, gave the team a much-needed boost, and in 2018 Tegevajaro made the big jump from the Regional ranks to the JFL.
Coach Ishizaki retired the following year, but he team picked up a few veteran ex-JLeaguers and began the charge towards professional status. A mere two years later, in 2020, the team earned J.League associate status, and finished the season in 4th place - just barely good enough to squeeze through into the J3. While the small size and relatively rural nature of Miyazaki prefecture is likely to limit the team's ambitions in the short term, at last Kyushu's smallest prefecture has a J.League team of its own.
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