Salaryman's Club

Name: Salaryman's Club
Genre: Sports
Released: 2022-01-30

リーマンズクラブ (Ryman's Club)

9.0(1)

OtakuDen

7.3(32,679)

MAL Score

Ranked #2950

Popularity #2633

Sports
Adult Cast
Workplace

Episodes: 12
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Jan 30, 2022 to Apr 17, 2022
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Corporate badminton proves tougher than it looks for Mikoto Shiratori. Once hailed as a child prodigy, he can’t deliver the results Mitsuhoshi Bank expects, especially as he tries to shift from doubles to singles after a past incident. His continued struggles ultimately cost him his position at the bank.

Mikoto gets a second chance with the Sunlight Beverage badminton team, only to discover the job comes as a full package: days in the sales department and evening practices. Even more frustrating, he’s expected to play doubles again despite his reservations. As he adjusts to life as both office worker and athlete, getting to know his new teammates may be what helps him regain his footing and push his career forward.

Otaku Consensus

Salaryman's Club landed as a respected niche sports drama rather than a breakout phenomenon, reflected in its solid MAL 7.34 and AniList 72/100 reception. Its strongest asset is Aimi Yamauchi's control of the adult-sports/workplace balance, making doubles badminton feel like a test of professional communication; the recurring criticism is that the 12-episode run leaves parts of the ensemble and corporate world less developed than its premise invites.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Salaryman's Club if you want the tactical satisfaction of Haikyu!! or the adult-team camaraderie of Run with the Wind without the usual school-club framework. Its appeal is not tournament escalation alone, but the way it treats badminton as a professional discipline shaped by hierarchy, sales meetings, team politics, and the emotional labor of doubles play. LIDENFILMS gives the matches a grounded rhythm built around spacing, reactions, and partnership rather than superhuman spectacle, while the primarily adult male cast changes the temperature of the drama: failures have career consequences, not just locker-room disappointment. For viewers tired of teenage prodigies being insulated from real-world systems, this is a compact 12-episode sports anime with a distinct workplace texture.

Key Characters

M
Mikoto Shiratori(VA: Junya Enoki)
Mikoto stands out as a tightly wound adult athlete whose tactical memory and social friction make him feel more specific than a standard sports-anime rookie.
T
Tatsuru Miyazumi(VA: Shinichiro Miki)
Tatsuru is the older-partner counterweight fans tend to remember: relaxed, socially fluent, and designed to make doubles feel like workplace communication as much as court strategy.
S
Sota Saeki(VA: Kaito Ishikawa)
Sota adds a sharper competitive edge to the roster, helping the ensemble feel like a professional team rather than a school club with adult character designs.
T
Toya Saeki(VA: Ryota Osaka)
Toya broadens the cast's network of loyalties and rivalries, reinforcing one of the show's best qualities: its athletes read as coworkers first and teammates second.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
The series is an original TV anime credited to Team RMC, not a manga, light novel, or game adaptation. That gives its 12-episode structure a different shape from sports anime built mainly to advertise an ongoing source.
2
Its genre identity is unusually precise: AniList tags Badminton at 95% and Work at 92%, with Primarily Male Cast at 90% and Primarily Adult Cast at 85%. The office setting is not a cosmetic backdrop but part of how the show frames teamwork, hierarchy, and performance.
3
Aimi Yamauchi serves as both director and co-series composer alongside Teruko Utsumi. That dual role helps explain the show's consistent focus on rhythm, adult restraint, and the overlap between court chemistry and workplace behavior.
4
The character pipeline pairs Suzuhito Yasuda's original character designs with Majiro's animation character designs. The result is a cast built around clean silhouettes and businesslike presentation rather than the more flamboyant uniforms common to school sports anime.
5
LIDENFILMS' sports staging leans grounded: doubles positioning, partner awareness, and stamina carry more weight than exaggerated special moves. That choice fits a corporate badminton league where the athletes' bodies and schedules feel deliberately adult.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Salaryman's Club aired from January 30, 2022 to April 17, 2022 and finished as a 12-episode winter-to-spring broadcast, making it a concise complete-season watch rather than a long-running sports commitment.
Fun fact 2: The show is also known as Ryman's Club, a title that plays on the Japanese shorthand for salaryman while keeping the club-sports identity front and center.
Fun fact 3: Its database footprint shows a loyal but niche audience: MAL lists it at 7.34/10 from 32,481 votes, with a rank of #2920 and popularity position of #2620, while AniList records a 72/100 score and 397 favourites.
Fun fact 4: The visual side was split across several named supervisors: Masatoshi Kai as Art Director, Masahiro Satou on Art Design, Emiko Onodera on Color Design, and Naho Hasegawa as Director of Photography.
Fun fact 5: The official theme labels, Adult Cast and Workplace, are unusually important for a sports anime; they place Salaryman's Club closer to professional-life dramas than to the school tournament template that dominates the genre.