Ao Ashi is a story about understanding a person's limitations vis-a-vis the world around them, about how people's experiences to their home countries overlap with their experiences with their immediate social circles. It tells a story about players struggling to contrast belonging to a rising footballing power - albeit by no means a leading one globally - with their own sense of ambition, and negotiating between wanting to rise and prioritize ambition - even if it means risking the alienation that puts a sense of distance between you and others - and alternatively staying back home and reforming what you can, even if it means you can't rise as highly as you'd otherwise want.

Ashito is the embodiment of this central conflict the series puts forward, being a rash, impulsive man that puts himself ahead of his team. He's crude, violent and acts first, thinks second which both pushes him forward as a striker yet limits both his potential personal growth as well as his growth as a player, to say nothing of stunting his teammates' growth. This single-minded obsession with getting better without relying on others foreshadows his main flaw - which ties directly to the series' themes. The danger of forgetting what ground he stood on, that even brought him to the spot he's at, is highlighted over and over again in specific arcs, with several characters highlighted as foils to flesh this theme fully; this includes arguably the deuteragonist of the story in Fukuda as a negative example whose arc has concluded, Kuribayashi as an interesting positive example for appearing obsessed purely with ambition but taking others around him seriously and Akutsu for presenting an example of someone that saw football as a chance to reset the horrible ground he stood on, yet continues to live by the shadow of that regardless.

Arguably equally important to Ao Ashi as a story is the core appeal of football as not just a sport but as a means of causing, escaping and empathizing with the pain of others. Central to this particular theme's focus is Ashito and Akutsu's dynamic, who share the commonality of coming from impoverished backgrounds that saw in football a means of living lives they otherwise couldn't have, Tripone's arc seeing in football as a means of escaping racial prejudice, and perhaps most importantly Hana's arc, which is about as much as recovering from the trauma of watching the person she admired most cataclysmically fail and making sure Ashito doesn't make the same mistakes as well as enjoying football as a sport in spite of the sport causing and likely continuing to cause into the future personal pain in her own life. Her romantic dynamic with Ashito is simultaneously messy but also charming specifically because both characters to an extent see through each other later on in the story, which in spite of slapstick humor being used as a fairly predictable trope early on also grounds a certain nuance in that dynamic; interactions where the two speak heart to heart, and others where they don't speak much feel natural, almost comforting at times.

Plenty of side characters are also really damn well developed; a few examples were already previously highlighted, but Yuuma, Togashi, Anri, Nozomi and Shiba come to mind. Characters receive focus and exit the narrative frequently certainly (which is narratively justified considering the nature of the sport and how youth football works), but it's honestly somewhat astounding by the end to look back and realize just how many characters there were and how many were meaningfully developed past standard tropes. The series handles dialogue between the cast very well; characters feel relevant to the scenes they're in and the series abandons attempting to flesh out Esperion as a club member by member in favor of a personal journey developing characters as they struggle through Esperion's journey as a club and what it even means to play the sport. Some characters choose the comfort of what they know, others opt for a reformist approach to improve the system they're in, yet others aspire to go abroad to one day return and improve the system they're in and others yet finally want to self-improve because being talented at the sport is all they know. The series handles all these differing perspectives and how different characters feel about them in a way I'd say is nuanced, never saying one approach or the other is more or less correct...so long as characters never forget to appreciate on the ground they once stood on. Despite the story being largely centered on youth football with only a minority of the story focused on professional football, I think the series highlights just how massive the world of football is to everyone in it; there's always someone better, nobody's perfect, and you have to simultaneously live with that without slipping into negative nihilism and decline, a struggle that eternally prods at the cast as they grow as players.

Perhaps Ao Ashi's strongest strength is not just its humanization of its cast, but also its humanization of football as a sport; the series is chalk full of references and emphasizes the global appeal of the sport in a way that's easily understandable, from players being referenced to sports journalism being a pretty interesting subplot to how youth football works as an institution and how it differs from country to country. It does a damn good job showing off football as a uniting force, viciously criticizes ethnic and racial essentialism and showing off how social circles around the sport work. The series is certainly persistent in what it wants to say about the sport bringing people together and yet it works because its earnest and straightforward about it wants to say.

Yuugo Kobayashi is an honestly fantastic artist and I adore how this series aesthetically looks; there's some really clever uses of ink as a means of emphasizing narrative moments, and a pleasant grittiness to the way the series carries itself, from a lot of characters' messy hair to the tenderness of romantic moments between Hana and Ashito to the strong use of visual metaphor, with a specific use partway through the story standing out. I don't have much to complain about the writing either, which improves gradually as the series progresses. His writing works well for the emotionally charged journey Ao Ashi is and the paneling is often incredibly impactful, especially when used to convey physicality; I look forward to whatever his next work is and hope he takes pride in his work here.

Ao Ashi is the best football manga manga's produced that I have read to date, and one of the best sports series in general. It struck a chord with me both as a football fan and as someone that adores this medium, so much so that I've reread it since its completion, and my mind still occasionally drifts back to what it's trying to say as a story. It's one of my favorite manga ever, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Thank you to anyone and everyone that read this review, any and all feedback would be appreciated.