Eyeshield 21

Sena Kobayakawa is a timid and physically unremarkable student at Deimon Private Senior High School in Tokyo. Despite his frail appearance, he possesses exceptional speed and agility. These unique talents are recognized by the school's American football team captain, Yoichi Hiruma, who forcibly recruits him as the Deimon Devil Bats' running back. To protect Sena from rival teams seeking to recruit him, he is concealed under the alias "Eyeshield 21", playing while wearing a helmet with an eyeshield and publicly serving as the team's manager.

The team's initial foray into the spring tournament ends in a decisive defeat against the dominant Ojo White Knights, highlighting their inexperience. The team's true focus becomes the fall tournament, a single-elimination tournament where Tokyo's top teams vie for a chance to advance to the Christmas Bowl, the championship game between the best high school teams from the Kantō and Kansai regions. Determined to build a competitive team, Hiruma, Sena, and head lineman Ryokan Kurita assemble a ragtag group of players. This includes former baseball player Tarō "Monta" Raimon, who becomes the team's star wide receiver, and several delinquents who fill out the offensive line. Their shared ambition is to reach the Christmas Bowl, a particularly urgent goal for the second-year students as a school rule prohibits third-year students from participating in club activities.

Before the series was published regularly, Riichiro Inagaki and Yusuke Murata published two one-shots called Eyeshield Part 1 (前編, Zenpen) and Part 2 (後編, Kōhen) on March 5 and 12, 2002, in Weekly Shōnen Jump. When it would become a serial, the editorial department asked if Inagaki wanted to both write and draw the series, but Inagaki felt he was "so rookie", so he asked Murata to be the illustrator. Before being asked to work on Eyeshield 21, Murata had read some of Inagaki's manga and noted that they "had many cool design concepts of uniforms and equipment". He said, "it could be turned into a great manga story" and he would "be happy to take the challenge"; eventually he was chosen.

During Eyeshield 21's original run in the magazine, Inagaki went to the United States to see college football matches, and National Football League games. Despite having never played American football, Inagaki chose this theme after deciding that he wanted to create "a protagonist that was wimpy at the beginning, yet could perform outstandingly in a sports game", and with this premise in mind he decided that American football would be "a very suitable material". When originally creating Eyeshield 21, Inagaki said he was wary because he did not want his manga becoming "a simulator of football". The fact that football is not a popular sport in Japan also worried Inagaki.

By July 2025, the manga had over 27 million copies in circulation (including digital copies); individual volumes frequently appeared on top ten lists of best-selling manga there (see table). Individual volumes have appeared in Diamond Comic Distributors's lists of 300 best-selling graphic novels in North America several times. 5 percent television viewership rating. In 2006, Japanese television network TV Asahi conducted a poll for the top hundred anime, and Eyeshield 21 was placed 47th.

Moreover, Eyeshield 21's series is credited with increasing the number of Japanese teenagers playing American football. However, commenting on its genre's lack of popularity in the United States, Jason Thompson wrote in Anime News Network that "Even Eyeshield 21, a sports manga which is practically made for Americans, wasn't a big hit here".