Sports Anime

Taiki Inomata is a badminton player at Eimei, a school famous for sports, and he has a hopeless crush on Chinatsu Kano, the girls' basketball ace a year above him. When Chinatsu's parents move abroad for work, she comes to live at the Inomata family home, and suddenly the girl Taiki admires from afar is at his breakfast table every morning. Season 2 premiered on 4 October 2026 on TBS, with Netflix streaming worldwide. It picks up exactly where Season 1 ended: Taiki on the edge of confessing his feelings, only for the moment to be cut short by the return of Yumeka Kido, Chinatsu's estranged former teammate. Behind the scenes there are changes too. Daisuke Sako takes over as director and Electric Circus replaces Telecom Animation Film as the animation studio, with planning still by UNLIMITED PRODUCE by TMS. The season is planned at 12 episodes. The romance stays gentle and the sports stay serious: every confession is earned through training montages, tournaments and the small daily courage of living under the same roof.

Ashito Aoi is a talented but selfish young footballer from a small town in Ehime who gets scouted by Tatsuya Fukuda, youth director of Tokyo City Esperion, one of Japan's best academies. Season 1 turned him from a ball-hogging forward into a full-back learning to see the whole pitch. Season 2, which premiered on 4 October 2026 on NHK Educational TV with streaming on Crunchyroll, promotes him to Esperion's A team. That promotion is the whole story: the A team plays in the youth Premier League, against the best young players in the country, and its senior stars, playmaker Haruhisa Kuribayashi and defender Nagisa Akutsu, set a standard Ashito is nowhere near yet. The season runs 24 episodes across two cours, with the first cour covering his brutal education at the higher level. Production has changed hands: TMS Entertainment replaces Production I.G, and Kazuki Yokoyama directs, while series composer Masahiro Yokotani and composer Masaru Yokoyama return. The thinking football that made Season 1 a cult favourite among real football fans is very much intact.

Shoyo Hinata is short, fast and obsessed with volleyball, but his tiny middle-school team never stood a chance. Now at Karasuno High he must team up with Tobio Kageyama, the setter who once crushed him. Animated by Production I.G and adapted from Haruichi Furudate's manga, Haikyuu!! follows Karasuno (once called the 'flightless crows', a fallen powerhouse school) as a new generation rebuilds the team and claws its way back toward the national stage. Across four TV seasons (2014–2020) and now a run of cinema films, the series turns school volleyball into pure drama: no superpowers, no shortcuts, just real technique, teamwork and rivalries that grow over years. What makes it special is how much it loves everyone on the court. Rival schools like Nekoma, Aoba Johsai, Shiratorizawa and Inarizaki all get heroes, heartbreaks and reasons to win, so even Karasuno's defeats feel meaningful. The Hinata–Kageyama partnership, a lightning-fast quick attack built on total trust, drives the story, but this is an ensemble piece where bench players, managers and coaches all matter. Warm, funny and relentlessly exciting, it is widely loved as one of the finest sports anime ever made.

Kuroko's Basketball follows Tetsuya Kuroko, the near-invisible 'phantom sixth man' of Teiko Middle School's legendary Generation of Miracles. Now at Seirin High, he teams with fiery forward Taiga Kagami to beat his old teammates and prove teamwork wins. Animated by Production I.G from Tadatoshi Fujimaki's manga, the series ran for 75 episodes across three seasons (2012–2015) and finished in cinemas with the film Last Game in 2017. Kuroko's gift is being overlooked: coaches and crowds miss him completely, and he turns that lack of presence into laser-guided passes that thread entire defences. Kagami supplies what Kuroko lacks, height, power and a hunger to beat the five prodigies one by one. Around them, Seirin is an ordinary team with no history, built on trust by captain Hyuga, injured founder Kiyoshi and their tiny coach Riko. The result is a stylish, emotional take on basketball where every match asks the same question: can a team of friends outplay five geniuses who stopped believing in teams? Fast, funny and surprisingly moving, it remains one of the most popular sports anime of its generation.