Anime Like Haikyu!!: 12 Sports Anime That Play as a Team

Put Haikyu!! beside almost any other sports anime and the difference is the bench. Kuroko’s Basketball has its Generation of Miracles and Slam Dunk has Sakuragi. Haikyu!! has Yamaguchi, a first-year who spends months learning a jump float serve so the coach can send him on for one tense rotation in a match he otherwise watches from the side. The show cares about that serve as much as it cares about Hinata’s jumps, and that is the thing to look for next, more than volleyball: a team of uneven people, and a story that gives the substitute’s nerves as much time as the ace’s.

Haikyu!! itself is 85 television episodes across five series from 2014 to 2020, and the 2024 film The Dumpster Battle adapts the Nekoma match. If you have skipped the film, it comes before anything below. After that, the first four picks each keep a large part of Karasuno, and the eight shorter ones keep a single piece.

Run with the Wind, for a team made of housemates

The closest match Run with the Wind

• 23 episodes
• complete

Ten students in a rundown boarding house are talked into entering the Hakone Ekiden, a university relay race, by the one housemate with a plan.

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It starts with a shoplifter. Kakeru Kurahara grabs bread from a convenience store and bolts, and Haiji Kiyose, pedalling after him on a bicycle, sees a runner with perfect form. By the end of the night Kakeru has a room at Chikusei-so, a crumbling boarding house, and Haiji has decided that its ten residents, most of whom have never raced in their lives, will qualify for the most famous university relay in Japan.

Production I.G, the studio behind Haikyu!!, made it, and the resemblance is structural. Kakeru is the Kageyama, a gifted runner whose temper has already cost him a team. Prince, a manga obsessive who can barely finish a training run, is the Yamaguchi: the show makes sure you know he is the weakest and treats him with complete respect anyway. Everyone gets a private reason to run, and the ten legs of the race give each of them a stretch of road.

The mismatch is pace. The first half is cooking, rent and arguments, and the race itself does not start until the final third. If you want a match every few episodes, go to Kuroko’s Basketball first. Run with the Wind finishes completely in 23 episodes, which is rare for the genre. Content notes: a serious knee injury, and an assault on a coach in one runner’s past.

Chihayafuru, for a club built from scratch

For the club Chihayafuru

• 25-episode first season
• seasons of 25 and 24 follow
• stops before the manga's end

Chihaya Ayase wants to be the best competitive karuta player in the world, and first she needs five people to start a high-school club.

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Competitive karuta is played with a hundred cards, each printed with the second half of a classical poem. A reader chants the first half, and two players kneeling on tatami race to swipe the matching card, sometimes before the reader has finished the first syllable. The show makes that as physical as a spike. Cards fly across the room, fingers bruise, and Chihaya, who falls asleep on trains and benches between matches, becomes a different person the second she crouches.

The Karasuno comparison is the club. Chihaya recruits Taichi, a clever childhood friend who keeps losing to her; Kana, who joined for the poems and the kimono; Nishida, a former junior player who is better than he admits; and Tsutomu, nicknamed Desk-kun, who keeps notebooks on everyone and has never done anything athletic. Their first team tournament plays like Haikyu!!‘s Inter-High on a smaller mat, with a scoreboard you care about by the second round.

What it adds is a love triangle between Chihaya, Taichi and Arata, the friend who taught her the game, and it moves slowly across all three seasons. Our romance guide has shows that move faster. Madhouse made 74 episodes between 2011 and 2019, and they end before the manga does, so the last season closes a chapter rather than the story.

Ping Pong the Animation, for a rivalry gone sour

For the rivalry Ping Pong the Animation

• 11 episodes
• complete

Two boyhood friends at a table-tennis club: Peco has the talent and the grin, Smile has the discipline and no interest in winning.

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Makoto Tsukimoto is nicknamed Smile because he never does. Yutaka Hoshino, Peco, dragged him into table tennis as children and has coasted on charm ever since. At high school the gap between them flips, and an old coach in a tracksuit decides that Smile is the most promising player he has ever seen, whether Smile wants that or not.

Masaaki Yuasa directed it from Taiyo Matsumoto’s manga, and it looks like nothing else in sports anime: wobbly ink lines, matches cut into split panels like a comic page, faces that stretch as a rally speeds up. If the first episode’s drawing puts you off, give it a second. The reward is a supporting cast who each get to lose with dignity, above all Kong Wenge, a Chinese player sent to coach and compete at a Japanese school he openly despises.

The fit is the rivalry. Haikyu!! makes Hinata and Kageyama’s partnership feel inevitable; Ping Pong asks what happens when one friend stops turning up. At 11 episodes it fits into two evenings, it ends properly, and its final episode is the best on this list.

Kuroko's Basketball, for the tournament ladder

For the tournaments Kuroko's Basketball

• 25 episodes
• three seasons of 25, then the Last Game film
• complete

Tetsuya Kuroko is so unremarkable that opponents lose track of him on court, and he has turned that into a weapon.

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Seirin High’s basketball team has a second-year student coach, Riko Aida, who can read a player’s stats by looking at him with his shirt off. It has Taiga Kagami, a first-year who learned the game in America and wants the strongest opponents in Japan. And it has Kuroko, a pale, quiet boy who redirects passes so quickly that nobody on the other team registers where the ball came from.

Kuroko used to be the hidden sixth man for the Generation of Miracles, five prodigies from one middle school who now play for five rival schools, and each season is built around beating one or two of them. That ladder is the most Haikyu!! part of the show: a known set of rival teams, each with a style you learn to fear before you meet it. Production I.G made both series, and both know when to cut from the court to the faces on the bench.

The mismatch is realism. By the second season the players have abilities closer to fighting-show techniques than to basketball, and if Haikyu!!‘s grounded physics mattered to you, that will grate. What Kuroko’s gives back is an ending: 75 television episodes, then the 2017 film Last Game, and the story is done.

More, briefly

For the argument against teamwork BLUE LOCK

• 24 episodes
• a second season of 14 continues

Three hundred high-school strikers are locked in a facility until one becomes the most selfish forward in Japan.

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Ego Jinpachi, the bony coach who designed the programme, thinks Japan loses at football because its players pass too much. Blue Lock is Haikyu!!‘s thesis turned inside out, with Yoichi Isagi learning to value his own goal over the team’s. The animation dips in places, and the cast are cruel on purpose. Watch it if Karasuno’s harmony ever felt too tidy.

For the long season Ace of the Diamond

• 75 episodes
• two more series, 178 episodes in total
• stops before the manga does

Eijun Sawamura, a loud country pitcher with an awkward delivery, joins a Tokyo baseball powerhouse where he is far from the top.

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This is the closest thing here to Haikyu!!‘s grind: practice, benchings, and the slow politics of who gets the mound. Sawamura and Satoru Furuya, the other first-year pitcher, split a Hinata-and-Kageyama rivalry across two personalities, with Kazuya Miyuki, the sharp-tongued catcher, reading both. The episode count is enormous and the anime stops before the manga does. Give it ten episodes to find its rhythm.

For one athlete and a coach Yuri!!! on ICE

• 12 episodes
• complete, and the announced film was cancelled

Yuri Katsuki, a Japanese figure skater after a humiliating season, is offered coaching by his idol, Victor Nikiforov.

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MAPPA’s 2016 series covers a single Grand Prix season, and each performance is a full routine set to music written for the show. The team is two people, three if you count Yuri Plisetsky, a furious Russian teenager who wants Victor back. The relationship between coach and skater is the heart of it, and the show is open about it. Twelve episodes finish the season.

For the relay Free! -Iwatobi Swim Club-

• 12 episodes
• more seasons and films follow

Haruka Nanase only wants to swim freestyle. His friends want to restart their school swim club, and his old relay teammate Rin wants to beat him.

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Kyoto Animation sold this on the swimsuits and delivered a show about friends learning to swim a relay, where every changeover depends on trusting the next person. Rin Matsuoka, who swam with them as children and came back from Australia bitter, is its Kageyama. Twelve episodes finish a clean arc, and the franchise continues through Eternal Summer and several films.

For the one-on-one match HANEBADO!

• 13 episodes
• no second season

Nagisa Aragaki, the ace of her school's badminton club, loses badly to a first-year who seems to care nothing for the game.

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LIDENFILMS animated some of the most physically convincing rallies in sports anime, shuttle and footwork both. The story around them is harsher than Haikyu!!: Ayano Hanesaki, the gifted first-year, is the daughter of a badminton champion who walked out on her, and that anger drives the plot. The camera lingers on bodies more than it needs to. The 13 episodes stand alone.

For a team with no ball Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

• 12 episodes
• a clean stopping point

Three first-years start an animation club: one designs worlds, one animates movement, one handles the money.

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Midori Asakusa fills notebooks with imaginary cities, Tsubame Mizusaki is a teen model whose parents want her to act, and Sayaka Kanamori turns their daydreams into deadlines. When they sketch, the show slips into their pencil drawings. Masaaki Yuasa directed it, as he did Ping Pong, and the club’s deadline crunch plays like a five-set match. Twelve episodes end on a finished film and a natural pause.

For the thrill SK8 the Infinity

• 12 episodes
• finishes its tournament

Reki, a skateboarding obsessive in Okinawa, teaches Langa, a snowboarder just arrived from Canada, to race at a secret track called S.

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Hiroko Utsumi, who directed the first Free!, made this at Bones, and it is the most purely fun show here. Reki is a Hinata who never gets the talent; Langa picks up skateboarding faster than his teacher, and the friendship strains exactly where Hinata and Kageyama’s might have without a coach to hold it together. The races down an abandoned mine are ridiculous, and that is the point.

For the quiet version Tsurune

• 13 episodes
• a second season of 13 follows

Minato Narumiya quit kyudo after developing target panic, releasing the arrow too early. His new school's archery club needs a fifth member.

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Kyoto Animation’s archery series is Haikyu!! at the volume of a library. Matches are silent until the arrow lands, and a team of five shoots in sequence with every hit counted toward the total, which gives each turn the pressure of a rotation. If Haikyu!!‘s shouting was ever too much, start here. The Linking Shot, the 2023 second season, keeps the same team.

Pick by what you loved

Two of these fit into a weekend, Ping Pong and SK8 the Infinity, and our one-weekend guide has more at that length. If what you loved was a decent kid finding his people rather than the sport, anime like Mob Psycho 100 is closer. For the whole field, open the Finder with Haikyu!! selected and keep the Sports genre on.