Twelve Defibrillators and a Training Session Without a Ball: How Urawa Reds Prepare for the Worst at Saitama

A September afternoon in Saitama, still carrying the humid heat of the Japanese summer, with the stadium not yet open to spectators. Inside a meeting room, about thirty people are kneeling on the floor, hands stacked on hands, pressing down in even rhythm. They are not players. They are members of a football club whose daily work is selling tickets, guiding guests, arranging seats, and on this day they are learning a skill no one hopes to use: chest compressions for a stranger lying on the ground.

A few hundred metres away, twelve automated external defibrillators sit at twelve different positions around the stadium. Eight water stations are placed across the stands. The match between Urawa Reds and Fagiano Okayama is scheduled for the thirteenth of September, and the host club wants to be certain that if the worst happens at their ground, someone will know what to do.

I read the report three times. The first time as a journalist, the second as a spectator who has spent countless hours in crowded stands, and the third as a man who has stood in empty stadiums and heard something no one needed to tell him. When I stand in an empty stadium, I hear the echo of matches that never took place. And inside that echo, sometimes, there is also the sound of someone failing to breathe.

This is a sports report with no goals, no transfers, no league table. It has only thirty people kneeling on a floor and twelve machines. But sometimes a report like this says more than a derby.

Why a football club would teach people to perform CPR

Urawa Red Diamonds is one of the biggest brands in Japanese football. Their home ground, Saitama Stadium, belongs to the group of largest capacities in the league, and every matchday tens of thousands of people pour in. A club of that scale cannot only care about who plays right-back.

The programme Urawa Reds is running with the Japanese Red Cross Society began last December. There have been three sessions so far, around thirty participants each. Thirty sounds small, and I will say so plainly later. But first, it is worth understanding why this club decided to do it at all.

The stated reason is very concrete: cases of sudden illness occurring inside the stadium are on the rise. It is a gentle but important admission. It acknowledges that a football stand, where people usually see only flags, flares and singing, is also an environment with medical risk. A crowded stand is a collection of tens of thousands of bodies, and among them there are always hearts beating out of rhythm.

I have witnessed that scene. Not in Japan, but in another league, in another country. A man collapsed just in front of a row of seats, and the most frightening part was not the collapse, but the silence. No one knew what to do. Someone called emergency services, someone filmed, someone screamed, someone just watched. In that silence, a few minutes stretched out like extra time, and a few minutes are the entire difference between a life and what remains.

That memory has stayed with me for years. It makes me ask a question every time I read about spectator safety: if I were sitting in that row, would I know where the nearest defibrillator is? To this day, in many stadiums I have visited, the answer is no.

Urawa Reds is trying to turn that answer into yes.

Thirty people and a chain of survival

What stands out in this programme is not the number thirty, but the content of the session. The participants, according to the report, are club members of various ages. They learn an emergency response procedure, practice cardiopulmonary resuscitation and the use of an automated external defibrillator, and are taught how to call for help.

Those movements look simple. On the training floor, one person kneels, hands stacked, presses the centre of the chest of a mannequin, counting. Thirty compressions, two breaths, and if a defibrillator is available, turn it on, attach the pads, follow the machine's spoken instructions. A session lasts a few hours. But what is being taught is not only movement.

The most important skill the Red Cross usually teaches in such courses has a dry name: checking scene safety before approaching. Learners must check for danger, from exposed wiring to oncoming traffic, before kneeling beside the casualty. It is the first principle of every first-aid course, and it is precisely what crowds tend to skip. In panic, the human reflex is to rush forward, shake the person, lift them up. That reflex can put two people at risk instead of one.

The second is the rule of the designated commander. In a crowd, people tend to look at each other waiting for someone to do something. Diffusion of responsibility means no one does anything. Breaking it is simple but rarely taught: look directly at one person and give a clear order. You, call emergency services. You, go get the defibrillator.

The report does not detail every step, but the programme's emphasis on how to call for help shows it is teaching the right thing. First aid is not a performance of courage. It is a procedure.

The third, and perhaps the least considered, is that the programme targets club members rather than only medical staff. The reason is practical. On matchday, the club's medical team is only a handful of people, and they stand by the touchline. When a spectator has a problem in row twelve of stand B, the first person to reach them is not the club doctor. It will be a steward, a drinks vendor, a fan sitting nearby. Thirty trained people in one session, if they are positioned in the right places, can cut the critical window down to a fraction.

Numbers that should not be read as a scoreboard

Twelve defibrillators in twelve locations, eight water stations, three sessions, thirty people each. These figures are easy to turn into a nice headline. But set against the capacity of a large Japanese stadium, the picture becomes more complicated.

Saitama Stadium is one of the largest in Japan, with a capacity in the tens of thousands. With twelve defibrillators, the average is one unit per several thousand spectators. This is a figure I cannot judge as sufficient or insufficient, because I have no benchmark to compare against. The report gives the number of units, but not how far apart they are, how long retrieval takes, how many people know where they are, or when the batteries and pads were last checked. Those details do not appear in the release.

That is why I call this a report that needs to be read carefully. The story of a club teaching first aid to its staff is a good story, and I believe it is true. But sometimes the beauty lies in what is told, while what is untold lies elsewhere.

Beyond the defibrillators, the eight water stations also deserve a closer look. September in Japan is still hot. High temperature and high humidity put spectators sitting in the sun at risk of heatstroke. This is not a distant worry. In recent years, both the J.League and major Asian competitions have had to handle weather more seriously. Placing water stations is a simple and effective measure. But as with the defibrillators, the number eight does not tell us whether people can find water before they collapse.

A former international as storyteller

The human element in this report deserves its own paragraph. The person who took part in the session and spoke in the report is Masayuki Okano, a former forward who once wore the Japan national team shirt, now a Urawa Reds brand ambassador. He no longer plays. He appears as a representative, an inspirer, a connector between the club and the community.

It is a small detail that says a lot about how a big club operates. Urawa did not send a communications director to read a statement. They put forward a face fans recognise. A former international standing beside a steward, kneeling on the same floor, practising the same compressions. That image makes a dry subject like spectator safety feel close to ordinary people.

What I noticed is that Okano's words in the report do not praise the club. He talks about the seriousness of the participants. This carries a Japanese cultural signature: humble, other-directed, not claiming credit. But it is also a clever communications choice. If the club wanted to show off what it had done, it would invite suspicion. If the learners are allowed to speak, the message carries more weight.

Beyond that, the appearance of a former star at a spectator-safety event carries another meaning. It tells fans that the people who once made the history of this stadium still care about the people who come to watch. A good club is not only one that wins many matches. It is one that still remembers the stands after the match is over.

The contrarian angle: a gap called the responder

Now comes the part where I take off my shoes and look. Urawa Reds' programme is the right thing to do. But there are three gaps I do not want to skip, because a writer on spectator safety who only offers praise is not doing the job.

The first gap is scale. Three sessions, around thirty people each, adds up to under a hundred trained people. Against the tens of thousands present at a major match, that is a very small number. The programme is right in principle, but if it stops at three sessions, it is like placing twelve defibrillators in a ten-thousand-seat stadium and calling the safety story complete. The real task is to expand the scale and deliberately distribute trained people across seating zones and shifts. A trained person in stand A cannot help someone who collapses in stand D.

The second gap is verification. All the facility information in the report comes from the club. The number of defibrillators, water stations, sessions, participants. These figures are correct as a release, but a release is not an audit. No independent party confirms that the batteries in the twelve units are good, that the pads are not expired, that signage in the stands is visible enough, or that trained people are actually present at every match. I am not saying the club is hiding anything. I am saying this report is a single source, and readers should treat it as such.

The third gap, and perhaps the deepest, concerns what I want to call the real-world chain of survival. That chain has four links: early call for help, early compressions, early defibrillation, and professional aftercare. A training session in a meeting room solves the first three theoretically. The fourth link, and the harsh conditions of an actual stadium, are not in the training room. In a real stand there are tall staircases, narrow aisles, dividing barriers, and a crowd unwilling to stand up because they are watching football. Getting a defibrillator to the right place within minutes, under those conditions, is a different problem from the one on the floor.

I write this not to belittle Urawa Reds' programme. I write it to point out that even a good programme can be misread. The right question is not how many machines a club has. The right question is: when a heart stops in row twelve, how many seconds pass before someone kneels beside it?

The empty-stadium summer and the memory of silences

I remember another summer, when football had to stop. That empty-stadium summer left me with something I still carry when I read reports like this one. When there were no spectators, I realised the stands are not decoration for the match. The stands are half the match.

When the crowds came back, I began to look at them differently. I counted ages. I saw many grey heads in football stands, in Japan and in Vietnam. I saw fathers bringing sons, and grandchildren bringing grandfathers. A modern football stand is a cemetery of memories not yet written into books, and it is also a living room shared by generations. In a space like that, the probability of a weak heart is not small.

In Vietnam, I have sat in many stands with tens of thousands of seats. I have seen fans sing for ninety minutes, jump, cheer, light flares, cry when their team loses. I have never seen, in those stands, a clear sign pointing to the nearest defibrillator. That makes me wonder whether I ever really looked. Perhaps I too belong to the group who only learn about defibrillators when one is needed, and that is already too late.

This is why I believe the Saitama story is worth reading in Vietnam. Not to compare who is better. We do not live in the same football culture, do not have the same budgets, do not have the same infrastructure. But we have the same kind of spectator: a sixty-year-old man sitting in row twelve, clutching his chest, collapsing while the whole stand keeps singing.

What Vietnamese football can take home

I do not believe in lifting a foreign model wholesale and pressing it onto another football culture. But I do believe in learning principles. And the most important principle in this report is very simple: spectator safety is also part of professional football.

What Urawa Reds does does not require a huge budget. A first-aid course run with a local Red Cross society is not expensive. A session for thirty people is not expensive. What is expensive is time and persistence, and what is most needed is someone in the organising body willing to take responsibility for it.

In Vietnam, clubs and stadium operators already have medical regulations. But between having a regulation and having a person who knows what to do when someone collapses are two different things. I once wrote that fans do not need us to show them the way to the stadium. They need a map for excavating memory, to understand why they are still standing there after every rise and fall. Now I want to add one more clause. Beyond a map of memory, they need a map of safety. They need to know that if their heart stops in row twelve, a human being will kneel beside them.

Football is a sport we usually talk about in terms of victory. But there is another victory that is not recorded on the electronic board. It is the victory of an afternoon when someone manages to breathe. It is the victory of thirty people kneeling on a floor, learning to preserve a life, while outside the fans are singing and none of them knows they have just been protected.

An archaeologist of football does not only dig up memories of goals and defeats. He also digs through the layers people usually forget: procedures, discipline, and the people behind the scenes. In those layers, sometimes, he finds something more precious than a trophy. It is the awareness that the life of a stranger in the stands is also part of the responsibility of this game.

Why I chose to write about a report with no ball

I have done this job for many years. I have reported on big matches, stood at tournaments the whole world watches, sat in press rooms listening to coaches talk tactics. I know reports like those tend to be read more. A first-aid session by a Japanese club will not shake a Vietnamese football forum.

But I also know this: the most important moments in a fan's life are rarely the ones broadcast. They are small, quiet moments no one films. A steward who knows how to let an ambulance into the right lane. A fan who knows how to count compressions while waiting for help. A club that thinks about situations that have not yet happened.

In Vietnam, we love football fiercely. We cry when our team loses. We take to the streets when our team wins. But that love sometimes makes us forget that what sustains football is not only emotion. It is also invisible systems: medical care, security, logistics, and sessions without a ball.

I write this for the Vietnamese football people who may read it. Not to tell them they must copy Japan. But to remind them that in another country, people are kneeling on a floor learning compressions, and that means we too can start with something as small as that.

A closing note from a man searching for forgotten layers

There is a line I keep telling younger colleagues: every sports story has two versions. The version that is broadcast, and the version that never is. A good sports writer is one who knows the second version is often more important.

The Urawa Reds report is the second version. It has no goals, no scorer, and many readers may scroll past it. But if you have read this far, I hope you carry one question with you: at the stadium you usually visit, if the person next to you collapses, do you know where the nearest defibrillator is?

Answering that question is the first step. The next is turning the answer into a skill. And the last, the hardest, is turning the skill into a habit of an entire football culture.

Twelve defibrillators in Saitama do not guarantee that no one will die in the stands. Thirty people kneeling on a floor do not guarantee that every heart will be saved. But they guarantee one simple thing: someone has thought in advance about the worst. And in a world where clubs usually think only about the next match, thinking in advance about the worst is an act of kindness.

Football is not measured only by goals. It is also measured by the number of people kept in the stands. Urawa Reds has just reminded us of that, with twelve machines, eight water stations, and one session with no ball at all.