KFC Uerdingen has presented its first new signing of the winter. Takumi Yanagisawa comes from SV Straelen, but will not be a financial burden on the club.
After five departures, KFC Uerdingen has also announced its first new signing of the winter. However, this is no ordinary signing. “Sponsor gives Takumi Yanagisawa as a gift,” reads the press release from the Krefeld club announcing the signing of the Japanese striker, who spent the first half of the season at SV Straelen and had to look for a new club due to the latter’s withdrawal.
“The signing was only made possible by the earmarked funds of a sponsor who wanted to strengthen the team,” explained Marc Schürmann, 1st chairman of KFC. “The transfer does not place any additional burden on our budget, otherwise we would not have done it.”
The 28-year-old has been playing in Germany since August 2019. In his first Oberliga season in the Lower Rhine region, he impressed at TuRU Düsseldorf with eight goals in 21 league games. Just one year later, he moved to 1. FC Bocholt, where Yanagisawa made a total of 43 appearances in two years, scoring twelve goals, setting up five and celebrating promotion to the Regionalliga.
Yanagisawa made 78 Oberliga and eleven Regionalliga appearances.
This was followed by a separation, but his performances caught the attention of Straelen, who signed the striker, who usually plays on the right, in December 2022 after he had been without a club for almost three months. Eleven appearances later (one goal, one assist), Yanagisawa was relegated to the Oberliga Niederrhein with SVS, where he was one of the regulars in the first half of the season, starting 17 of the 18 games and scoring four times.
The new signing gives coach Marcus John an alternative in attack to his top scorer Hinata Gonda (eight goals and two assists in 13 appearances), who is out until March with a torn medial ligament.
Meanwhile, the SVS squad continues to thin out. Yanagisawa is already the twelfth Straelen player to find a new club, with three more set to follow shortly.