Badminton Anime: All 3 Series, Ranked

There are exactly three badminton anime worth your time, and one of them is not the romance that most lists claim it is. That mistake comes from a scoring term, and it has been copied around the internet for years.
A badminton anime suits the medium better than almost any other sport. A smashed shuttlecock leaves the racket at around 400 km per hour, which the sport’s own promoters use to call it the fastest game in the world. So the medium can show you something television cameras struggle to follow.
Here are all three, ranked, with the production details checked and the usual errors corrected.

Why Badminton Works So Well Animated

Every sports anime genre lives or dies on whether the action reads clearly. Badminton has an advantage that volleyball and football do not.

Speed: A smash leaves the racket faster than any other racket sport can manage
Scale: Two players and one small object, so the frame never gets crowded
Stakes: Singles play means nobody else to blame, which suits character drama
Rhythm: Rallies build and break naturally, giving episodes a shape for free

The structural advantage: Team sports need the camera to explain who is where. Badminton needs none of that, since there is one opponent across a net and one shuttlecock between you. That leaves the animation budget free for faces and footwork, which is why these shows tend to look better than their episode counts suggest.

The Badminton Anime, Ranked

Only three badminton anime exist. Here they are from weakest to strongest, and even the weakest is worth a look if you like the sport.

Love All Play

First, the correction. Love All Play is not a romance, and it never was. The title is the umpire’s call that begins a badminton match, since love-all means nil-nil.
It is a straight coming-of-age sports drama about a boy who was good without ever being coached properly.

Source: A four-volume novel series by Asami Koseki, published by Poplar between 2011 and 2014
Studios: Nippon Animation and OLM, directed by Hiroshi Takeuchi
Run: 24 episodes, April to September 2022
Story: Ryo Mizushima gets scouted to Yokohama Minato High School under a legendary coach

Where the romance myth comes from: There is a South Korean live-action series from 2022 also called Love All Play, and that one really is a romance about badminton players. Somewhere along the line the two got merged, and the description stuck. The anime has no romance plot to speak of. It has 24 episodes of a teenager learning to hit properly, and it is slow, faithful and a bit bare.

Salaryman’s Club

Also released as Ryman’s Club, this is the only one of the three set outside a school, and the premise is far more specific than most summaries admit.
These are not hobbyists who form a team after work. Corporate sports teams are a real institution in Japan, and these men are employed partly to play.

Type: An original anime rather than an adaptation, animated by Liden Films
Crew: Directed by Aimi Yamauchi, with original character designs by Suzuhito Yasuda of Durarara fame
Run: 12 episodes on TV Asahi’s NUMAnimation block, January to April 2022
Story: Mikoto Shiratori is sacked by Mitsuhoshi Banking after losing a match, then recruited by Sunlight Beverage

A hook the old version missed: Mikoto has not played doubles since something went wrong at an interhigh match, and his new teammate Tatsuru Miyazumi refuses to accept that. So the series is about a man whose job depends on a sport he is afraid to play properly. Getting fired for losing a game is a bleak opening, and the show earns its warmth from there.

Hanebado!

The best-looking and most ambitious badminton anime of the three, and the one that treats badminton as a way of getting at something else entirely. Most write-ups describe it as a talented girl joining a school team, which misses the entire point.
Ayano avoids badminton at the start. There is a reason.

Source: Kosuke Hamada’s manga in Kodansha’s good! Afternoon, 2013 to 2019, across 16 volumes
Studio: Liden Films, directed by Shinpei Ezaki and written by Taku Kishimoto
Run: 13 episodes, July to October 2018, with an English dub from Funimation
Setting: Kitakomachi High School in Kanagawa, where Ayano is a first-year

The premise everyone leaves out: Ayano’s mother, Uchika Hanesaki, was a reigning champion who trained her daughter for years. Then Ayano caught a cold before an important middle-school match and lost, and Uchika left. Her grandparents raised her after that. So this is not a story about talent. It is a story about a girl who associates the sport with being abandoned, and the badminton is how the show gets at that. The chapters in the manga are even numbered as Rallies rather than chapters.

Why There Are Only Three

Badminton anime is thin on the ground, even though the sport is one of the most played on earth. The reason is less mysterious than it looks.

Supply: Sports anime overwhelmingly adapts existing manga, and badminton manga is scarce
Competition: Basketball, volleyball and football have decades of hit series behind them
Timing: Two of the three arrived within three months of each other in 2022
What that hints at: That cluster suggests studios were testing the sport rather than avoiding it

A note on the old version of this page: This post previously ran two separate sections arguing that badminton anime is scarce and that more should be made. They said the same thing twice and contained no information, so they are now one section with actual reasoning in it. The scarcity is a supply problem in manga, not a lack of interest.

Badminton Manga Worth Knowing

If three series is not enough, the printed side has a little more, although less than you might hope. Two of the anime above have manga attached.

Hanebado!: The original 16-volume manga, which runs well past where the anime stops
Love All Play: A manga adaptation drawn by Dam Miyata ran on Tonari no Young Jump in 2022
Ryman’s Club: A spin-off by Kou Sakashita ran on Comic Bushiroad Web from 2022 to 2023
Side story: A Hanebado! light novel by Yuichi Mochizuki, set a year before the manga

One claim I could not verify: The previous version recommended a badminton manga called Smash! by Kaori Saki, running from 2006 to 2010 and following a student named Taira Shouta. I could find no reliable record of it anywhere, and the only page that came up repeating the claim was this one. It may be a garbled reference to something else, so I have left it out rather than pass it on. Worth a check before you restore it.

Three badminton anime, one of them permanently mislabelled as a romance, and a sport that deserves more attention than it gets. If you only watch one, make it Hanebado for the animation and the emotional weight. If you want something gentler, Salaryman’s Club is twelve tidy episodes about adults.
Which badminton anime did you rate highest? Let me know in the comments.