Episode 4: Premonition and Intuition

Still stinging from the loss to Team X and its brilliant, self-obsessed striker Baro, Team Z takes Ego's order to heart and starts naming the weapons each player will carry into the next fixture. Isagi cannot pin his own down and refuses to fake one, leaning instead on the faint smell of the goal he caught during the previous match. Kuon floats a scheme in which the squad rotates clockwise every few minutes so every member gets a stint as striker.

Over dinner Kunigami thanks Isagi for a pass and shares that he plays to become a real-life football hero, the kind of match-winning striker he worshipped as a boy rather than any invented champion. He splits his steak with Isagi and suggests that the instant, subconscious read behind that pass may be Isagi's true weapon. When the fourth match begins, Team Y sits deep and defends, quietly baiting Team Z forward so their number nine, Hibiki Okawa, can strike on the break.

Team Z cycles its strikers, testing Bachira's dribbling, Kunigami's left-footed range shot, and Kuon's leaping, but Team Y smothers each in turn. Okawa's delicate lob over Iemon hands Team Y the opening goal. As a Team Z corner looms, Isagi feels a premonition, drops back against his own attack, and recognizes that playmaker Ikki Niko is the one truly fueling Okawa.

Isagi cuts out Niko's intended pass before it can reach Okawa. His follow-up shot is deflected by Niko, yet Gagamaru races in to force the loose ball across the line, gashing himself on the post while congratulating Isagi on the read. The strike levels the contest after Okawa's earlier counter goal. Niko tells Isagi that the two of them share the same kind of eyes, but warns that Team Z still cannot win because he is the one steering the game. The episode also cements Kuon's rotation tactic as the framework for Team Z's approach and frames Isagi's split-second decision-making as the weapon he has been unable to name.

The episode aired on October 30, 2022 within the First Selection Arc, adapting chapters 9 through 12. It opens with Chaos ga Kiwamaru and closes on WINNER, following Episode 3 and leading into Episode 5. Its Additional Time short, Meals at Blue Lock, has Isagi and Igarashi snooping on richer dinners and begging Kunigami to swap his curry for their natto and radish; he agrees once, then happily trades instead with Chigiri for stir-fried vegetables, leaving the other two in tears.