Full name | Nagoya Grampus | ||
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Nickname(s) | Grampus Eight | ||
Founded | 1946 | as Toyota Motor SC||
Stadium | Toyota Stadium | ||
Capacity | 44,692[1] | ||
Owner | Toyota | ||
Chairman | Toyo Kato | ||
Manager | Kenta Hasegawa | ||
League | J1 League | ||
2023 | J1 League, 6th of 18 | ||
Website | https://nagoya-grampus.jp/ | ||
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Nagoya Grampus (名古屋グランパス, Nagoya Guranpasu); formerly known as Nagoya Grampus Eight (名古屋グランパスエイト, Nagoya Guranpasu Eito) is a Japanese association football club that plays in the J1 League, and have for all but one season since the inauguration of the league, following promotion from the J2 League in 2017.
Based in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture and founded as the company team of the Toyota Motor Corp. in 1939, the club shares its home games between Mizuho Athletic Stadium (capacity 27,000 and the J.League's oldest serving stadium) and the much larger Toyota Stadium in the city of Toyota (capacity 45,000).
Grampus had its most successful season up to 1996 when it was managed by Arsène Wenger, well known for his subsequent exploits at Arsenal. They won the Emperor's Cup and finished second in the J.League, with their FR Yugoslavia captain Dragan Stojković being named J.League MVP. The 1995 success was eclipsed on November 20, 2010, when the club won its first J.League trophy, under the management of Stojković.[2]
The team's name was derived from two prominent symbols of Nagoya. The first is the shachihoko (tiger-headed carp) statues atop Nagoya Castle, also called shachi; this word is a homophone with the Japanese word for orca, a species formerly referred to as "grampus". The second is the maru-hachi (circle-eight), Nagoya's official emblem. The team's mascot is Grampus-kun, an orca.[3]
Grampus-kun is J.LEAGUE's famous orca or "shachi" in Japanese—chosen by Nagoya Grampus as "shachi" also refers to the mythical creatures that adorn Nagoya Castle. Those "shachi" are a blend of the head of a tiger and the body of a carp and are said to protect temples and castles from destruction.