Description
FC Gifu are a professional soccer club in the J. League, currently playing in the J2 league. Their home town is the entire Gifu prefecture, centering around Gifu city. As their home stadium they are using the Gifu Nagaragawa Stadium in Gifu city.
The team was founded in 2001, after receiving support from the Gifu Football Association, with the goal of becoming stronger for the National Sports Festival of Japan. They passed the Gifu Prefecture League’s 1st division, Tokai Adult Soccer League’s 2nd and 1st division and promoted to the Japan Football League (JFL) in 2006.
On their first JFL season they finished with good results in 3rd place out of 18 teams. The temporary J. League committee accepted them as J. League members starting from 2008, which made FC Gifu the second soccer club from the Tokai region to enter the J. League after Nagoya Grampus.
After promoting to J2, in the 2009 Emperor’s Cup, they beat J1’s JEF United Chiba and made it to their first quarter finals, but in their league matches, their slump has continued for a long time.
In 2014, FC Gifu hired former Japan National Team player and captain of Verdy Kawasaki, Ruy Ramos, as their new manager. In addition, by acquiring players like Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi, Alessandro Santos and other World Cup experienced veteran players, the team became the talk of the entire nation and their average visitor numbers also shot up.
However, all of this didn’t reflect in their results, as they continued to fight in the lower end of the league as usual and in the middle of the 2016 season manager Ramos was dismissed.
From 2017 they have been fighting under a new manager.
FC Gifu’s home jersey is green. Their supplier up to 2016 was “gol.” and from 2017 their shirts have been supplied by New Balance. The team’s outfits have logos of their sponsors like NGK/NTK, Seino Transportation, and others.
