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.
Captain New Japan stable, Hirasawa largely continued in the midcard largely serving as the fall guy in tag match. On 28 June, Seigigun entered a six-man tag tournament with Nagata, Inoue, and Hirasawa forming one team, while Machine teamed with Tonga Strong Machine and Pink Strong Machine (Yoshie). However, both teams lost. On 12 September, there was a special Mitsuhide Hirasawa farewell match, which he would lose. After embarking on an extended tour of Puerto Rican World Wrestling Council (WWC) in September 2010, Hirasawa adopted the new ring name Hideo Saito, as a tribute to Masa Saito and Hideo Nomo. On 25 September,