Description
V-Varen Nagasaki are a professional soccer club in the J. League, currently part of the J2 league. Their home town is the entire Nagasaki prefecture, focusing on cities like Nagasaki and Isahaya. Team’s home stadium is the Transcosmos Stadium Nagasaki (Nagasaki Athletic Stadium).
The club was founded in 2004 when Ariake Soccer Club and Kunimi High School old boy team “Kunimi FC”, that were active in Ariake town, united to form Ariake SC. In that year, they won the Nagasaki Prefecture League championship and by coming second in the Kyushu Regional Football Championship, they secured their promotion to the Kyushu League.
In 2005, they hired former Sanfrecce Hiroshima and Verdy Kawasaki player, who was also a former Japan National Team striker and a local from Nagasaki city, Takuya Takagi as a technical advisor. In addition, they changed the team name to V-Varen Nagasaki. V-Varen won their first Kyushu League championship in 2006, came 3rd in 2007 and 2nd in 2008, always being able to maintain their high position. In the 2008 Japan Regional Football Champions League, V-Varen came in 2nd after the winners FC Machida Zelvia, which finally earned V-Varen their promotion to JFL.
In 2009, they were recognized as a J. League associate club. In their 4th year in JFL, in 2012, they got their first championship victory and they would start in J2 from the 2013 season.
In their first year in J2, in 2013, they hired the previous Roasso Kumamoto manager, who also worked for V-Varen in 2005 as a technical advisor, Takuya Takagi, now as their new manager.
As a result, the team played 11 matches without a loss from the start of the season. Riding the wave of success, they eventually finished 6th in the league and advanced to the J1 playoffs.
Unfortunately, in the semifinals of the playoffs, their match against Kyoto Sanga FC ended in a draw, which shattered their dream of promoting to J1, but as a first year team they had huge success.
They ended their season in 6th place once more in 2015 and again advanced to the J1 promotion playoffs. However, this time they lost 0-1 to Avispa Fukuoka and were eliminated in the semifinals.
V-Varen Nagasaki continued to fight for a promotion to J1 for the 5th year in a row under Takagi’s command and in 2017 season, finally they earned promotion to the J. League’s first division for the first time after keeping a second-place spot in the league with a 3-1 home win over Katamare Sanuki.
V-Varen joined J2 Champion Shonan Bellmare in the J1 next season.
The team’s home jersey is blue and their shirts have been supplied by hummel since 2014. Their outfit have logos of their local sponsors like Japanet, Choporo, Ringer Hut, and others.
