Honda would be a reinforcement to a starting line-up player for pretty much every side in the Eredivisie, barring perhaps Ajax, PSV, and AZ. Instead, these clubs pay more money for players who can only be classed as average (so far).
Besides the sporting aspect, there is an obvious second benefit in signing Honda. You see, signing Asian players is also a good idea because of their commercial profitability. Like Shinji Ono at Feyenoord and Hidetoshi Nakata in Italy a few years ago, as well as Shunsuke Nakamura at Celtic right now, Keisuke Honda’s progress will be followed avidly back in his homeland.
Celtic, Feyenoord, and Nakata’s Italian clubs all have or had merchandising outlets across Japan and profit from television specials on their players, which are beamed back to their adoring fans.
Even Honda’s current club, Dutch minnows VVV Venlo, have a fanclub and a fanshop in Japan. Even their website was translated into Japanese, so VVV is currently the only Dutch club with a Japanese version of the official club site.
All the effort put in has been well worth it. Japanese fans take their football very seriously and they have plenty of money to plonk down on merchandise. Most of the better players have a strong fan following, so signing them could be rather profitable.
With Honda being an international and one of the star players of the Japanese U23 team in the Olympics, you can rest assured that he has plenty of fans and media attention will be over-whelming.
Even now, playing in the second tier of Dutch football, there's always Japanese news crews around, reporting about everything Keisuke does. Imagine what would happen if he made a transfer to a big club...
For both sporting and financial reasons, I can’t understand why none of the top flight clubs have started negotiating a deal for "Keizer" Keisuke.
Still, remember the name Keisuke Honda—we might be hearing more from him in the future.
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