A Deep Dive on Shion Shinkawa's Off-The-Ball Movement
Scanning, staying on a defender's blind-side, double-movements, & other details!
Shion Shinkawa was heavily linked to a move to Sint-Truiden after his club Sagan Tosu announced this last Monday that he was “in negotiations for a transfer to an overseas club”. Today, (finally) the move has been officially announced! This time I’m going to do something a bit different as even writing the shorter versions of “Shogun Soccer Scouting” can be a lot of work. For this newsletter I am going to focus on a particular aspect of the player in detail1.
Although usually an attacking midfielder/second-striker type player, Shion Shinkawa was deployed a lot as the striker in a Front 3 for Sagan Tosu in the 2025 season. As a result he performed a lot of box runs and off-the-ball movements in general so that is what I’m going to be writing about today. There are probably other players where this analysis is more applicable but I’ve watched him a lot (i.e. I don’t want to waste all the edited footage that I worked on a few months ago) and he’s the one getting a transfer right now!
Let’s get started!
Date of Birth: August 6th, 2007
Age: 18 years old
Nationality: Japan
Position: Attacking Midfielder, Striker, Second Striker
Club: Sagan Tosu
Squad Number: #47 (2025 season)
Height/Weight: 1.71m // 65 kg (Source: Soccer Digest)
VIDEO NOTE: Sagan Tosu’s HOME kits are light blue patterned shirts with pink markings, light blue shorts, with white lettering, light blue socks. AWAY kits are white shirt, socks, and shorts with black lettering & light blue highlights. I’m using footage from the 2025 J2 season. Shinkawa wears #47.
DATA NOTE: The percentile ranking stats for the radar viz are all from WyScout courtesy of Ben Griffis’ best XI app.
Off-The-Ball Movement
When making runs against the defense, a player needs to consider both the lateral gaps (between individual players in the defensive line) along with the vertical gaps (in most cases the pockets of space between the midfield line and the defense line). To exploit these it’s not simply about speed but well-timed accelerations and decelerations into these gaps when they open up either through the defenders actions or by moves initiated by the attacker himself. In certain cases, pausing or even stopping outright, the absence of further action is also the key. With human vision being limited from a bio-mechanical standpoint, a big emphasis is placed on attackers to position themselves on the “blind-side” of a defender.
There’s a lot of decision-making, often in split-seconds that the attacker needs to make to get a good shot on goal. The way to identify these gaps is to have good spatial awareness which comes from scanning. The act of swiveling your head or body to scan isn’t just about the frequency but about the when/how, making sure you are doing so in the right moments. You don’t want to get caught out scanning just when a teammate is passing/crossing the ball toward you as you then are reacting instead of anticipating and moving first. A really good overview on this whole topic is “3 Level Scoring: A Framework for Analyzing Box Movement” by sthsthburner that helped me organize my thoughts for this particular newsletter.
The simplest kind of movement is seeing a gap and running hard and fast through it. Given Shinkawa’s decent speed and acceleration, he can pull this off with ease at the youth (club and international) and J2 levels.
Before getting to more intricate movements deep inside the box, Shinkawa also shows good runs for opening space for others, also being able to pause and stay in a good position to receive.
As the play progresses behind him, Shinkawa is adept at sneaking away from the nearest defender’s field of vision, forcing the defender into the dilemma: continue watching the ball and lose the attacker, or watch the attacker and lose sight of the ball.
Lastly we get to a few examples where Shinkawa uses a combination of the different types of off-ball movement seen in previous clips. These “double movements” involve shifting into the defender’s blind-side and then darting back in front with a strong step to accelerate to create that bit of separation from the defender.
Throughout the footage, you can see how Shinkawa tries to time his scanning and movements to align with his teammate’s actions. This is a crucial point and being on the same wavelength as your teammates, building that chemistry through practice sessions and communication is a very important part of success in these sequences.
Shion Shinkawa exhibits a lot of the good aspects of off-the-ball movement at a very young age in a professional league setting which bodes well for his future. Of course, one also has to remember that this is all being done against J2 defenses. He will face-off against smarter, agile, and more physical opponents in Belgium… and beyond. Shinkawa still has more moves to master along with simply gaining more reps on the kinds of movements he is already good at but the ingredients are there to see.
Summary
While this article was focused on Shinkawa’s box movement, I’ll give a broad summary of what I think of him in general here but in bullet-points.
I think Shinkawa has a very good 1st touch to settle passes or take the ball into his stride without breaking momentum in his runs.
Shinkawa does tend to struggle with keeping the ball with back-to-goal vs. defenders when coming under immediate pressure.
It is far more ideal when Shinkawa receives vertical passes in pockets of space so he can turn forward before pressure/contact arrives.
He is quite good at taking down lofted balls and is able to drive forward on the half turn when peeling out wide. In these situations he can take the ball in his stride with his good touch and shield the ball, riding contact with momentum in his favor.
Shinkawa has a quick trigger to get shots off before the “gap” closes but there are also times where he rushes and doesn’t quite have the composure to take the best shot.
Could improve on jumping for headers, the timing of his leaps as he does get into good positions in the box.
As described above, Shinkawa makes lots of great movements in-and-out of the box to get away from defenders. Therefore he should be able to accumulate lots of xG that hopefully turns into actual goals as his composure improves, especially if he is given the proper supply of passes and crosses.
What’s nice about Shinkawa is that he can generate his own shots off the dribble too. Good at carrying forward in transitions from the middle 3rd of the pitch. Powerful strides from out wide and cutting in (see first goal vs. Roasso Kumamoto). He really comes alive in attacking transitions with runs forward with/without the ball in support.
Moderate defensive work-rate. Inhibited by lack of frequent scanning that allows opponents to escape from his marker or cover shadow to receive the ball and bypass Shinkawa’s position in the press/block.
I’m quite interested to see where Shion Shinkawa plays for Sint-Truiden, both in the remainder of this 2025/2026 season and beyond. While he is known to be more of an attacking midfielder/second striker type, Shinkawa spent most of his appearances for Sagan Tosu in 2025 as an out-and-out striker at the tip of a 3-4-2-1 formation. It was rather intriguing that his manager Akio Kogiku would play him up top even at times when fellow teenager Daichi Suzuki, an actual striker, was also on the pitch. Shinkawa played considerable minutes for an 18 year old debutant, even if most were coming off the bench. He played in 33 out of 38 games but only started six.
My line of thinking is that with Keisuke Goto playing so well but with no buy option (Anderlecht still rate him highly), Sint-Truiden want to ease in another striker for the next few months to get ready for next season. However, there has been speculation that Shinkawa is more of a replacement for Ryotaro Ito at the #10-ish position which has made me re-think quite a bit. It is absolutely true that he doesn’t quite have the size to be playing striker full time, at least as he is physically right now at the level required in the Belgian league. Perhaps Shinkawa will grow a bit more and get used to competing physically with some time but it may be best to ease him in from a slightly deeper position.
I’m also surprised that Sint-Truiden bought a player at this age. I don’t think they’ve bought someone this young since Takehiro Tomiyasu. Sint-Truiden have largely refrained from buying Japanese teenagers to keep faith in their local academy talent from the Limburg area. This is the type of balance that the Japanese management have enforced to ensure that the local identity of the team remains intact and keep local fans invested.
Back to Shion Shinkawa, I do consider him one of the higher-end of the current teenager generation of Japanese attacking talents (somewhere in between the Los Angeles 2028 and Brisbane 2032 Olympics generations) but obviously at just 18 years old he still has a long road ahead of him. There are plenty of things he’ll need to continue developing, including his already-good box movements that I highlighted here today.
Hope you enjoyed this! I was getting rather tired of the usual format so I thought I’d spice things up a bit. It’s also a lot less video work I need to do which is the most time-intensive part of doing these.2 Let me know in the comments or DMs about:
Did you enjoy this different format?
Is it better to have more shorter posts somewhat regularly than a long post every four-ish weeks (well, outside of the transfer window)?
Are there specific things you want me to highlight for other Japanese players?
Thanks for reading!
As an aside, another good J2 player with great box movement is Hiiro Komori. I wrote about his “fox-in-the-box”-ness for JEF United last year and there are lots of video examples involving the concepts I talked about above too.
Resources, Limitations, etc.
Video analysis: DaVinci Resolve 18
Tactical diagrams: Tacticalista
Time period: 2025 J2 Season
Footage: Broadcast footage, no tactical camera
Stats: FBref, Transfermarkt, WyScout, FotMob
Player radars: Ben Griffis
Maybe I’ll call it “The Shogun’s Spyglass”. A new recurring newsletter section? And yes, I love alliteration.
Given Sint-Truiden took over two weeks to actually announce him, I probably would’ve had time to write a full piece on him. I finished this last week and I’ve been sitting on it since then! It’s fine though, I spent the time catching up on Bundesliga and the Belgian League instead. Also the U-23 Asian Cup!