Nippon Professional Baseball merged with the Orix BlueWave and were replaced by the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. Until 1993, baseball was the only team sport played professionally in Japan. In that year, the J.League professional soccer league was founded. The new soccer league placed teams in prefectural capitals around the country—rather than clustering them in and around Tokyo—and the teams were named after their locations rather than after corporate sponsors. The wave of players moving to Major League Baseball, which began with Hideo Nomo "retiring" from the Kintetsu Buffaloes, then signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers, has also added to the financial problems.
Hideo Hashimoto Hideo Hashimoto Hashimoto is an Osaka City University graduate and he played for Gamba's junior youth team and youth team before signing for them as a professional player. He started to break into the first team in 2002 and established himself as a mainstay in Gamba's midfield in 2005, contributing to the club winning the J. League Championship that year. His first cap as a full international came when he substituted Keita Suzuki on 1 June 2007 in a friendly against Montenegro. He was a member of the Japan team for 2007 AFC Asian Cup and played one game as