Ao Ashi is a sports anime that follows the journey of Ashito Aoi, a young and fiery soccer player whose chance meeting with enigmatic coach Tatsuya Fukuda presents him with a chance to join his professional youth academy. The Ao Ashi manga has been going since 2015 and covers over twenty volumes. The series won the 2020 Shogakukan Manga Award and has since gone on to print over 15 million copies.
How Many Episodes Will Ao Ashi Have?
It has been confirmed that Ao Ashi’s first season will have 24 episodes. As is common with Japanese anime, Ao Ashi will be releasing two DVDs for the season, each containing half of the 24-episode season. 24 episodes is a standard length for an anime spanning two cours. Ao Ashi premiered during the Spring 2022 season and continued throughout Summer 2022. However, anime spanning two consecutive cours are quite rare. Aside from long-running series like One Piece, the only other notable two-cour runs in 2022 were A Couple of Cuckoos and Summer Time Rendering. Spy x Family was a split-cour season, with a gap between the first and second parts. Ao Ashi also had a primetime slot on Japanese TV – 6:25 PM on Saturday – which is rare considering most anime premiere late at night. All this may indicate how much faith producers and broadcasters had in this series’ potential.
Could There Be More Ao Ashi Episodes in Future?
Given the success of the first season so far, it’s likely, but not certain, that we will see more of Ao Ashi’s story in the future. The first question regarding any anime’s continuation is usually the source material. Thankfully, Ao Ashi has plenty to work with here. Ao Ashi has adapted around five chapters per episode on average. If it keeps to that pace, the first season will adapt around 120 chapters of the manga. However, Ao Ashi’s manga is at nearly 300 chapters total, meaning there should comfortably be enough source material to work on a second season. Many other factors go into whether a series is green-lit for a sequel, though. There are broadcasting, production and marketing timetables to work around, which is why most anime sequels don’t appear until over a year later, whether planned before the first season’s conclusion or not. So far, there has been no word regarding Ao Ashi Season 2. However, it’s common for a second season not to be announced until significantly after the first season, so fans should not lose hope. For now, we’ll just have to wait and hope that we’ll see Ashito on a soccer pitch again sometime soon!
