Tenma walks into a Raimon that's forgotten why it loved soccer in the first place, and he has to remind them. The show starts slow and whiny about it, but once it commits to the absurdity of its own universe, the hissute techniques, the friendship power-ups, the sheer ridiculousness of soccer as spiritually transcendent combat, it becomes genuinely joyful in a way the original series earned but this one gets to inherit. By the end you're watching kids rediscover passion one impossible goal at a time, and it actually means something.

Tenma Matsukaze arrives at Raimon Junior High as a first-year soccer fanatic with a gift for dribbling but plenty left to learn. Ten years earlier, Raimon earned its fame through a showing at the Football Frontier International, a tournament for the world's top youth teams. The passion that made the club famous is now gone. A shadowy group called Fifth Sector has taken over soccer in Japan and decides the result of every match, ordering teams when to win and when to lose, and players across the country have stopped loving the game. Tenma joins the soccer club, and he and his teammates set out to push back against Fifth Sector's grip, backed by an opposing group known as the Resistance. The result is a sports series with supernatural touches.