BLUE LOCK CHAPTER 24: GOAL FORMULA
BLUE LOCK CHAPTER 24 – A DETAILED BREAKDOWN:
GOAL FORMULA
The Room Before the Storm
The chapter opens not with urgency, but with something almost absurd. Inside the Team Z room, with the most important match of their lives looming twenty-four hours away, the players are playing a guessing game. Someone pulls a face. Someone else calls it.
“The ‘I wonder how grandma’s doing’ face.”
“The ‘my tummy hurts!’ face!”
“This is so hard!! How were we supposed to guess that?!”
It is the kind of noise that boys make when they are too frightened to sit in silence. And then the door bursts open, and the laughter dies.
“Hey! What are you guys doing?! Try to take this more seriously!! Our last match is coming up!!”
The meeting that follows is tense before it even begins. Someone suggests strategy. Someone else pushes back.
“Come on, we can’t be keyed up all the time!”
But underneath all of it, one presence in the room makes everything heavier. One person sits among them who should not be trusted. And someone notices. Quietly, with the kind of stillness that precedes an explosion:
“I still haven’t forgiven this jerk.”
The Traitor in the Room
The anger that had been simmering beneath the surface finally breaks. Someone grabs him. Someone else joins in.
“You’re probably planning to give away our strategy again, right?!”
“Before that, let’s all take a swing at him!”
“Sounds good, Raichi! He needs some discipline!”
But one voice cuts through the chaos with a cold, practical edge:
“Hey… stop it! I understand how you feel… but what if he gets hurt?! We’ll end up having to play with just ten of us again!”
The room fractures. Someone snarls back:
“So what?! Are you defending this trash?!”
And the answer, stripped of all emotion, lands like a stone dropped into still water:
“All I’m saying… is that we can’t beat our strongest opponent without eleven players.”
A fist flies anyway. A body hits the floor. And then, from the mouth of the very person they despise, comes something nobody in that room was prepared to hear.
The Calculation of a Coward
He coughs. He straightens. And then he says it plainly, without shame, without apology:
“Even if Team Z loses… I’ll still advance as scoring king with my three goals. Doing nothing at all is in my best interest.”
The room goes cold. Someone is barely holding themselves back:
“Guess I really am gonna kill you.”
But then a counter-offer arrives, delivered not with heat but with quiet, almost dangerous certainty:
“Then, in the next match… if I add three more goals to the one I have… I’ll become the scoring king with four goals.”
The response is immediate and dismissive:
“Ha… that’s impossible. There’s no way you could pull off a hat trick… against Team V with just ten players.”
And the reply, calm and immovable:
“I’ll do it. I’ll crush you fair and square.”
Then, turning to the one who refuses to play, the question hangs in the air like smoke:
“That make you still want to do nothing?”
A Man Who Always Gave His All
What follows is not defiance. It is something rawer than that. The voice that answers is tired, and the words come out with the weight of someone who has been carrying them for a very long time.
“Shut up… I always… gave soccer my all… dreaming of a World Cup victory…”
The room offers no sympathy. The voices around him are flat, dismissive:
“You’re the only one who talks about that stuff, Kuon-senpai.”
“Winning nationals, or representing Japan…”
“You’re too worked up about this. Count me out.”
And then, finally, the truth of it — not an excuse, but a wound:
“I’m not dropping out in the first round… I’m… sick of losing because of my teammates!”
The accusation lands. And the room erupts.
“You trash! How could someone like you become the world’s best?! That doesn’t mean you can turn around and stab us in the back!!”
His answer is delivered without flinching:
“Say whatever you want. I won’t see any of you again anyway.”
The Question That Changes Everything
Before the fury can swallow the room entirely, one voice calls out with something unexpected. Not rage, not grief — a question.
“Wait a sec. At the end of the final match… then who would move on to the next round? If, say, Isagi and Kuon both had three goals…”
A guess: “Probably… whoever had fewer yellow cards, right?”
Another: “What if all of it was the same?”
The answer arrives from someone who has clearly been thinking:
“Then whoever had the higher Blue Lock ranking would move on.”
The screen on the wall hums to life.
Ego Appears — The Rankings Are Revealed
The voice is unmistakable.
“Hello everyone. Jinpachi Ego here.”
“Now then, it’s time to announce the final Blue Lock rankings of the first selection round!”
He delivers the rules with the precision of a surgeon and the detachment of a man who has never once lost sleep over someone else’s fate:
“In the event that you guys lose and there’s a tie between goals scored and fair play points, then… whoever’s at the top of this ranking will be the one to move on to the next round!”
The list appears. The room stares at it. And then someone laughs — a sharp, ugly laugh.
“Ha ha… Just look! I’m at the top!”
Rank 265: Wataru Kuon.
The reaction is instantaneous:
“Why him?! Why’s a traitor like him ranked first?!”
Ego’s response is indifferent:
“For this first selection round, the ranking is based purely on points scored… so there’s no problem in terms of the rules.”
The room has no answer for that.
Garbage
And then Ego says the word that silences every single person watching.
“Actually, all of you are basically garbage.”
Nobody moves. He continues, each sentence landing harder than the last:
“As a striker, you’re… the lowest of the low.”
“I’m sure you feel like you’ve managed to claw your way back from the brink of death, but… it only went well now and then. That way of fighting has no value at all.”
He does not spare anyone. He does not soften anything. And then he asks the question at the heart of it all:
“Why can’t they make more than one goal in the same way?”
He answers it himself, and the answer is brutal:
“Because that goal was nothing more than a lucky coincidence.”
The Formula
What the world’s best striker needs, Ego explains, is not talent. It is not luck. It is not even passion. It is something colder and more demanding than any of those things.
“…a goal that can be duplicated.”
“Is a formula… that will reliably produce goals.”
The questions he asks are precise and relentless. How many players were on defense? How far from the net? Where did you receive the pass? What were you feeling in that moment?
“Thoroughly familiarize yourself with all of it and then do it again.”
He lays it out without ceremony:
“The world’s best strikers all have their own personal goal formulas!”
“You’re still living in the realm of coincidence! And that won’t do.”
The command that follows is delivered like a verdict:
“Produce the formula that makes you shine the brightest!!”
And then, the single most important thing he says — the thing that reframes everything that has come before and everything that will come after:
“Pound it into your brains that you can only evolve… once you can recreate your successes.”
“The one who can prove the formula they’ve created for themselves… will be able to mass-produce victories at an explosive rate… as the world’s best striker.”
He finishes with two lines that cut to the bone:
“Don’t win ‘now and then.'”
“Seize victory as a matter of course.”
Then, one final dismissal:
“The answer to your formulas is sleeping in the field… Those who can’t find it can piss off.”
The countdown begins: LAST GAME IN 23:59:59.
The Terms for the Traitor
Before the screen goes dark, there is one more matter to settle. A voice addresses him directly, quiet and absolute:
“For now, Kuon… don’t do anything in the next match…”
“Don’t help… or hinder us…”
“If you do anything at all, I’ll end you.”
He says nothing. The silence is its own kind of answer.
Isagi Moves
In the quiet that follows, one mind is working harder than all the rest. Isagi turns Ego’s words over and over:
“He’s right… winning ‘now and then’ won’t cut it…”
“A goal’s reproducibility… in other words, a weapon that can be used… again and again, at any time…”
And then the weight of everything lands at once:
“My weapon is my spatial awareness, but… I can’t do anything with just that… if I’m by myself… On top of that… we’ll be short a player in the last match…”
“At this rate, it feels… like we don’t stand a chance against Team V…”
The thought builds until it cannot be contained. He stands. He moves toward the door. Someone calls after him:
“Isagi? Where’s he going?”
He does not answer. He is already running. And the words driving him forward are simple and total:
“WE CAN’T WIN… IF WE DON’T EVOLVE!!”
“I want a weapon… that will let me fight on my own…”
The One Who Has Already Found His Formula
He arrives at the Team X training field. Balls scattered across the floor. A figure standing among them, alone, shirtless, carved from something harder than ordinary effort.
Top Scorer: 10 Goals.
Team X — Shouei Barou.
The figure turns. He takes in the sight of the boy who has come looking for something. And he says it with the flat, almost bored contempt of someone who has already won everything worth winning here:
“Huh? It’s the loser.”
A beat. Then:
“What are you doing here?”
The chapter ends there — on that question, on that training field, on the edge of something that has not yet begun.
The last match is less than twenty-four hours away. Isagi has found the man with ten goals and a formula already proven. What happens next will decide everything.
→ Continue to Chapter 25