YouTube taught – A Japanese teen turned YouTube field-goal practice into a placekicking career, earning a Raiders free-agent deal through the NFL’s International Player Pathway.
A Japanese teen’s dream of playing in the NFL went from a late, makeshift education to a moment watched by millions, after a leap that began with almost no English and a single goal: learn to kick.
Matsuzawa’s path is tied to the NFL’s International Player Pathway, an effort that has created unusual routes to rosters for players outside the league’s traditional pipeline. But even within that program, his story has stood out.
Football exists in Japan, even if it is not the first sport for most kids.. A semiprofessional league, the X League, was founded in 1971.. American universities once played Japanese universities in the 1980s and 1990s.. Flag football is practiced in elementary schools, and NFL games air weekly during the regular season and playoffs.. Matsuzawa’s father. Tetsuhara. had played quarterback at a Japanese university. though he left after one season due to frustration over lack of opportunity.
For the next 30 years. Tetsuhara kept his distance from American football. Matsuzawa said. and talked about it far less than his son expected.. In high school. Matsuzawa was focused on soccer and knew American football mostly through his father’s favorite players. including Tom Brady and Joe Montana. and the New England Patriots.
What Matsuzawa envisioned, at first, was a straightforward future in Japan: college, then a career.. But he failed Japan’s national college entrance exams once, then again.. He described that moment as the first time “things didn’t go the way I wanted to. ” adding that he did not know what he wanted to do next and felt he had reached “rock bottom.”
After graduating high school in 2017. he worked part-time waiting tables at a Morton’s steakhouse. but for the next two years he largely stayed within his family’s orbit.. He said his family never pushed him toward a particular path and that the prolonged period of uncertainty was draining.. He had “no dream purpose” and didn’t have the energy to chase one.. His father, watching his son struggle, eventually changed the direction.
“He just gave me the tickets to the United States, to America,” Matsuzawa said, describing his father’s message as a simple charge to leave Japan and “see in your eyes what is going on.”
Landing in San Diego in early September 2018, Matsuzawa carried only a backpack and had two items on his itinerary. He had to fly back to Japan from Los Angeles two weeks later, and he had to watch an NFL game.
To him, the trip mattered because American football was hard to access at home. “You can watch soccer, baseball in Japan, but not American football,” he said.
He heard about the San Francisco 49ers, but they were away at the start of the 2018 season.. Instead. he made his way to Oakland for a Raiders game. settling for a debut that ended with a 33-13 loss to the Los Angeles Rams.. It was, by his account, a high point amid feelings that were otherwise mixed.. Unable to speak English. he said he felt as helpless as a baby. and that sensation sharpened the sense of drift he had felt after high school in Japan.
Yet in the stands, he found something that shifted from helplessness to purpose. Watching the Raiders-Rams spectacle, he said, gave him a goal he could aim at.
“I realized this kind of sucks — once you go outside of Japan, you’re just nothing,” he said. “Then I think, you know, I want to do something great in the U.S. I want to make them realize I can do something in the U.S. by myself.”
Kicking, not glamour
Matsuzawa said that if the inspiration had arrived earlier, he might have tried the more glamorous positions of quarterback or receiver. But his delayed introduction to football and his soccer background pointed him toward placekicking as the most realistic starting point.
He began with YouTube videos of NFL kickers. including Jason Meyers. now of the Seattle Seahawks. and worked in a giant net at a public park.. For a while, he could nail kicks up to about 15 yards.. After roughly a year at the park. he began sneaking onto a field with American-style uprights at Kanda University. where some friends attended.
From there, he wanted structure and better equipment.. He made a 90-minute one-way trek to the office of the Fujitsu Frontiers. a semipro team in Japan’s X League. and asked for a deal: he would do whatever work was needed. including filming and cleaning. as long as he could use the practice field after training.
“And then that was the deal. And then they say, ‘Yeah, of course,’” he said.
The arrangement gave him access to American-style uprights and to coaches and players who, he said, encouraged him.. Eventually he joined specialist kicking and weightlifting sessions, enough to compile a highlight reel.. He sent it via direct message on Twitter to dozens of U.S.. junior college coaches and found only one team willing to take a chance: Hocking College in Nelsonville. Ohio. in a town of about 4. 500 people.
Rural Ohio, a new language, and trial-and-error
Moving to Ohio came with an adjustment that went beyond the field. Matsuzawa watched clips of “Friends” and “Star Wars” to pick up English. He learned to cook from YouTube and cut his own hair to save money, even once cutting a three-inch-long chunk out of the back of it.
His kicking, he said, required the same kind of improvisation. Hocking lacked an experienced long snapper. In his first real-kick game, the snap from a wide receiver sailed over his head, the first sign of how quickly practice assumptions can break down under real pressure.
At Hawaii, the climb accelerated.
After reaching the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Matsuzawa became an all-America kicker last season for Hawaii. hitting 27 of 29 field goals. including 25 consecutive to open the season.. In his second year at Hocking, he made 12 of 17 kicks, including a 50-yard game winner.. At a national kicking showcase. his performance drew attention from Hawaii. a Division I program that could put him in front of NFL decision-makers.
His first season at Hawaii was spent as a backup, and in 2024 he went 12-for-16 with a season-long of 41 yards.. Before last summer. he said there was trepidation because the school had to scramble to find a teammate who knew how to hold for placekicks.. Still, he returned confident after working with a mental coach.
Over lunch during preseason, Hawaii’s long snapper told him he was about to have a big year and suggested he think about a nickname. The snapper’s idea, Matsuzawa said, was “the Tokyo Toe.”
Then the games began to turn.
Breakout, records, and a nickname for the public
In the first game of last season, Matsuzawa made three field goals, including a 38-yard kick in the final seconds to beat Stanford. His family watched from the stands.
“Winning the game, that is the best moment in your life,” he said. “That is the best feeling you can ever feel.”
He described a hunger that followed success. “I felt ‘a little bit addicted to being successful, and once you feel it you want to feel more.’”
Within days of that early run. as if momentum carried him past language and distance. Matsuzawa was doing interviews with major U.S.. media outlets.. He stayed in the news through the fall by setting a run of makes: he hit his first 25 field goals. matching the NCAA record for consecutive field goals to begin a season that had stood for 43 years.
He finished that season with 27 of 29 kicks, earning consensus all-America honors for the first time in Hawaii’s school history.
Draft day came and went, but the NFL door stayed open
Despite not being selected in April’s seven-round draft. Matsuzawa became one of the most discussed rookies in the league’s international circles.. He credited attention to the fact that his story had caught on in Japan, too.. The NFL’s Japan-focused Instagram account has fewer than 19. 000 followers. but a post showing the moment the Raiders called to tell him he’d been signed as a free agent earned more than 100. 000 likes.
Being signed by the Raiders, the franchise he watched in his first NFL game back in 2018, was a “full-circle moment,” he said.
Matsuzawa attended the 2026 NFL draft in Pittsburgh. He is part of the International Player Pathway, a program started in 2017 to develop international players on NFL rosters.
In the months leading up to the attention boom. Japanese media outlets based in the United States visited EBS Performance’s compact training facility in Southern California. a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. to record segments about his climb.. Hollywood interest followed as well; he met Meyers in April, the kicker after whom he modeled his approach.
“Timing is everything; mental is everything. ” said Byrd. a longtime trainer of NFL hopefuls. describing the appeal of Matsuzawa’s path as different rather than routine.. “It’s a lot of things that have to go into place for something to work. and we are all looking for something that’s different.. This is different.”
From anonymity to the reality check
Matsuzawa said it has been fun, watching the spotlight grow across countries. Yet he insisted it did not feel surreal. He believed strongly that he would eventually kick in the NFL, and the breakout came sooner than expected.
“Obviously, it’s fun” to vault from anonymity to being a sensation in two countries, he said. “But [I’m] trying to separate myself and what people think or what people say. I kind of knew that was gonna happen to me, because I always say I want to be an NFL player.”
He is in the NFL, for now. Still, the league’s harsh calculus does not disappear with a pathway spot or a viral story. He said seeing another free agent cut just days into rookie minicamp with the Raiders made clear that even with a potential longer stay on a roster, his position is not guaranteed.
For Matsuzawa, what has carried him from YouTube nets and self-taught routines to stadium lights is a practice that sounds simple but has kept returning.
“It’s why he talks to himself before every kick,” the story said, and Matsuzawa described the mantra directly. “Tell myself, like, ‘I’m elite,’” he said. “‘I make this field goal.’”
NFL Japan International Player Pathway placekicker YouTube training Raiders free agent Hawai‘i football