This manga is composed of a series of short stories, most only a single chapter, centered around soccer player Andou Sora. While all of them are at least loosely connected to Andou, he is only the main in the first chapter. Rather, they are from the point of view of people that he has an impact on. Each story is centered around the main character going through some sort of growth. Soccer is a major theme throughout these stories, but there are more stories that are only vaguely connected to soccer than stories where the specifics of soccer are focused on. And even when thespecifics of soccer are focused on, it’s generally to use the specifics as a parallel to an issue or characteristic in the main character beyond the scope of soccer. It’s nothing like the standard sports shounen.

Throughout these stories, you get to see Andou in different points of his career as a soccer player, all the way from middle school to the end. There’s also a bit of a long-term romantic plot thread involving him that shows up in the stories of several characters that’s pretty cute. However, the stories are completely out of order chronologically. It jumps back and forth without any sort of overarching pattern. The reasoning I suppose was probably variety. The stories that are centered around the same chronological point are often pretty similar, and thus by jumping around that resulted in things feeling less repetitive.

Still, the end result is that there is very little sense of progression. Most characters only have one story and have little to no presence after that. Even Andou only really has a character development in the first chapter, and after that he’s pretty static for the rest of the manga. And with everyone else, as it has to fit their stories into a single chapter, pretty much every story was pretty simple in terms of themes and what it was trying to convey. As such, most of the time it feels less like reading a serialized manga and more like you’re just reading a series of oneshots.

That’s not inherently a bad thing, but it does prevent the manga from being more than the sum of its parts. The various stories in this manga are a mixed bag. Some are great. Some are mediocre. But most are just okay. Every manga has its ups and downs, but generally the stronger parts build investment in the reader that elevates the weaker parts. This manga doesn’t really benefit from anything like that. While the great stories are interesting and have a lot of emotional impact, that doesn’t make the weaker stories any less dull. And that really drags down the manga overall.

The art was also pretty boring and unremarkable. It conveys the story well enough, but I didn’t feel like it had much value beyond that. The fan translation starts out pretty bad. One of the scanlators, Sense, doesn’t know English all that well and thus their translation is often awkward and sometimes hard to understand. The other, Fall Syndicate, seem to not know Japanese very well, and thus their translation has lines that are very different and, in some cases, even completely opposite to the original Japanese, though in perfect English. Thankfully the scanlators that picked it up after them are better.

tl;dr: A character focused soccer manga composed of a mixed bag of short stories.