A Cerezo Osaka Legend and a Soccer-Obsessed Actor Join the Cast
The guest casting is a treat for Japanese soccer fans. Hiroaki Morishima spent his entire playing career at J.League club Cerezo Osaka, earned 64 caps for Japan, and played in the 1998 and 2002 World Cups. He now serves as the club's president. This is his first Detective Conan appearance, and he shows up in the episode as a match commentator.
Yuka Kageyama is the returning veteran here. She was billed as a member of idol group Hinatazaka46 when she first guested on the series in "Behind the Scenes of the J.League Finals," which aired May 13, 2023. Now working as an actor, and a fixture on Japanese World Cup broadcast programs thanks to her well-documented love of the sport, she comes back for a second guest turn. In her comments she says she hopes a third is in the cards.
A Bomb Timed to the Final Whistle
The new episode drops Conan into a J.League opening match, where a bomb is hidden somewhere in a stadium full of spectators and rigged to explode when the match ends. Morishima's comments name the on-screen fixture: the fictional Tokyo Spirits vs. Big Osaka.
Soccer has always been baked into this franchise. Conan Edogawa, secretly the high school detective Shinichi Kudo, regularly kicks a soccer ball to get out of trouble, and the series has gone back to the sport repeatedly, most prominently in the theatrical film Detective Conan: The Eleventh Striker. This is also not the anime's first J.League tie-in; Kageyama's 2023 episode was itself a league collaboration.
More Nerve-Wracking Than a World Cup
Anime Anime, a Japanese anime news site, published full post-recording interviews with both guests alongside the announcement.
Morishima admits the recording studio rattled him more than actually playing at a World Cup, and says he was so excited about the offer that he blurted out "I'm going to be on Conan" to people around him. Kageyama's story is better: she received the offer as a letter during the show's official year-end YouTube live stream and burst into tears on the spot.
Both singled out the episode's handling of VAR. Kageyama, speaking as a fan who watches matches closely, praised how the script digs into video review, cutting-edge match technology, and the work referees do, and guessed there must be soccer fans on the Detective Conan production staff. She also put in a public request for another soccer-themed theatrical film.
Looking Ahead
The episode airs Saturday, July 18, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. on the Yomiuri TV and Nippon TV national network in Japan. As Morishima notes in his comments, it lands while the real 2026 World Cup is reaching its climax, which makes the timing about as good as a domestic-league promo can get.
The announcement does not mention international streaming plans for the episode. Gosho Aoyama's original manga is still running in Shogakukan's Weekly Shonen Sunday, and the anime, produced by Yomiuri TV and TMS Entertainment with Minami Takayama voicing Conan, is known to many English-speaking fans under its localized title Case Closed.