Tatsuya Tanaka

Tatsuya Tanaka, born in Shunan, Yamaguchi in 1982, spent his playing career as a forward and has since moved into coaching. At 168 cm he was never going to win games by out-muscling defenders, and that constraint tells you almost everything about the kind of player he had to become: quick, sharp in tight spaces, reliant on timing rather than force. I have a lot of time for that archetype. Small forwards live on a brutal curve. The explosiveness that makes them special in their early twenties is exactly what injuries and age take first, and plenty of them fade out without ever finding a second act. Tanaka found one. What interests me is what he can now teach. A coach who personally solved the problem of surviving as an undersized attacker has knowledge that does not show up in any statistics sheet. Those are usually the coaches worth listening to.

Name (English)

Tatsuya Tanaka

Name (Japanese)

田中達也

Reading

たなか たつや

Born

November 27, 1982 (age 43)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Dog

Origin

Shūnan-shi, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan

Height

168 cm

Occupation

association football player

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatsuya%20Tanaka%20(footballer%2C%20born%201982)
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%94%B0%E4%B8%AD%E9%81%94%E4%B9%9F%20(1982%E5%B9%B4%E7%94%9F%E3%81%AE%E3%82%B5%E3%83%83%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC%E9%81%B8%E6%89%8B)
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q523341

Tags

• Yamaguchi Prefecture
• association football player

Last updated

2026-08-07

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.