Game info: Sega Retro
Listening: physical soundtrack (tracks 1-6, incomplete), digital remaster (tracks 1-6, incomplete), YouTube (single video w/no timestamps, missing opening theme)
Credits
Sound Director: Tomonori Sawada
Music: Saori Kobayashi, Junko Shiratsu
Info
Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurou! (lit. “let’s make a pro soccer club”), officially abbreviated as Sakatsuku, is a mostly Japanese-only franchise of soccer team management sims developed by SEGA, similar to like the Football Manager series I guess; in fact, their latest game literally says on Steam that it’s “powered by Football Manager,” whatever the hell that means. The franchise’s thirtieth anniversary was earlier this week on the 23rd, so in celebration SEGA just released a lot of the series’s music on three digital albums. I do have a little bit of interest in Sakatsuku music, which surprising absolutely no one is because Saori Kobayashi wrote music for the first game, though there are some interesting composers on later games too so maybe I’ll listen to a lot of these games in a row. Especially since the latest game is a 2026 release, so we can make that “current releases” post number go up.
A lot of these soundtracks are very short, with this game apparently having only six tracks totaling less than ten minutes of music, though I wouldn’t put it past SEGA to have half-assed the compilation releases with respect to leaving some tunes out. We know that Kobayashi wrote the opening theme and Junko Shiratsu wrote the ending theme from their inclusion on the ’90s soundtrack album for the first Dreamcast game, but we don’t have a breakdown for the other four tracks; the instrument samples in Shiratsu’s piece stand out a bit from the rest of the soundtrack, so I’d guess the rest are all by Kobayashi.
The style of the music is somewhere around dated sports documentary and library music, a romplery mix of orchestral music and jazz fusion of different energy levels. The first time I listened to this soundtrack I didn’t really care about it besides one track, but on a relisten it’s not too bad actually. On both a jazz and an orchestral level they’re not the most complex tracks by either composer (we’ll be seeing cooler jazz fusion by Shiratsu specifically coming up), but there’s a little more meat in both respects than I remember there being. It’s fun!
Update (2026-03-03): I decided to actually check the game out because it has a music player in the options menu, and it turns out that, of course, it has quite a bit more music than just six songs. 18 songs and 17 jingles, by my count, in fact! So SEGA was just lazy and rereleased only the six ones they had already without recording anything new here, thanks pals you’re great. The unreleased non-jingles are mostly in a jazz fusiony style that sounds like the ending theme by Shiratsu, so it definitely sounds to me like she did do more than one piece of music and just got the short end of the stick here. I don’t think there are any hidden gems in there that improve how I feel about the soundtrack, but it’s about on the same level as the released music.
There are a few really good jingles though! I definitely liked them more than almost all of the main soundtrack music lmao.
Update #2 (2026-03-04): Saori Kobayashi confirmed on Facebook that she wrote all four of the uncredited tracks from the game included on the compilation soundtrack releases!
Recommended tracks:
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“Above The Horizon” (Kobayashi) was my favorite orchestral track, it’s just nice
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“Do That Again” (Kobayashi) is the one track from this game I think about all the time, because it sounds exactly like Panzer Dragoon if it was sports
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“The End and the Beginning” (Shiratsu) is the ending theme and the most progressive piece in the game, my favorite section is at 0:57
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“Sponsorship Agreement” (Shiratsu?) was my favorite unreleased track, it’s super funky
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“Crystal Cup Winner” is one of the two orchestral jingles that I liked most of all
(the final two tracks have unofficial titles)
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