Galatasaray striker Lukas Podolski will leave the club in order to join J1 League side Vissel Kobe, Turkish\u00a0media\u00a0have reported.<\/p>\n
According to fotoMac<\/em>, the 31-year-old will bid farewell to his teammates in Istanbul on Tuesday before flying to Japan to complete his medical and contract signing.<\/p>\n The high-profile move\u00a0was widely reported during the January transfer window, but did not materialize as Vissel seemed resigned to complete\u00a0the signing after the conclusion of the Super Lig season.<\/p>\n But the Japanese club’s\u00a0hand appears to have been forced after\u00a0ace striker Leandro, who shared the J1’s Golden Boot last season with 19 goals, suffered a tear to his left ACL that will keep him off the pitch\u00a0through August.<\/p>\n Podolski, who announced his international retirement last summer after 48 goals in 129 appearances for Germany, could\u00a0become the first foreign star to join the J.League following an infusion of cash from league broadcaster DAZN in a blockbuster 10-year, $2 billion deal.<\/p>\n Vissel’s parent\u00a0company Rakuten made waves of their own in\u00a0November when they were revealed to be Barcelona’s new uniform sponsor beginning next season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Galatasaray striker Lukas Podolski will leave the club in order to join J1 League side Vissel Kobe, Turkish\u00a0media\u00a0have reported. According to fotoMac, the 31-year-old will bid farewell to his teammates in Istanbul on Tuesday before flying to Japan to complete his medical and contract signing. The high-profile move\u00a0was widely reported during the January transfer window, but did not materialize as Vissel seemed resigned to complete\u00a0the signing after the conclusion of the Super Lig season. But the Japanese club’s\u00a0hand appears to have been forced after\u00a0ace striker Leandro, who shared the J1’s Golden Boot last season with 19 goals, suffered a tear to his left ACL that will keep him off the … Continue reading “Report: Lukas Podolski to join Vissel Kobe this week”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":1578,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[127,381,290,95,289],"class_list":["post-1577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-japan","tag-j-league","tag-j1-league","tag-lukas-podolski","tag-slider","tag-vissel-kobe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}