Weekly Shonen Jump Killed Sports Manga Between 2015 and 2018
Kotono Katō is back in serialization with Set Match!
This is the same Katō who spent five years building Altair: A Record of Battles into a geopolitical chess game that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2005 to 2015. Weekly Shonen Jump is the flagship serialization venue where manga dreams live or die. The gap between those two facts is not a career move, it is a symptom.
Jump killed the sports manga pipeline between 2015 and 2018. Not all at once, not on purpose. Systematically enough that the genre went from a core pillar of the magazine's identity to an afterthought. One Piece, My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen took the space where Kuroko's Basketball, Haikyu!!
The economics shifted. Weekly shonen readers wanted isekai and power-escalation narratives, not the patient, character-driven accumulation that defines sports manga. Publishers saw the data and moved their resources—by 2020, sports serials had become a niche category, something you attempted on a smaller platform with a smaller audience if you attempted it at all. Katō understood this before he understood anything else about Set Match!.
He chose soft tennis specifically because unglamorous sports no longer need mainstream validation. Soft tennis is played mostly by Japanese middle schoolers and ignored everywhere else—it cannot ride the anime adaptation wave that saved Haikyu! , it will not spawn a global merchandise machine. In 2005, that would have disqualified it from Jump entirely. In 2024, on a digital-first platform with no volume expectations, those constraints become freedom.
