Chapter 24

Inside Team Z's dorm, Bachira, Gagamaru, Igaguri, and Isagi kill time with a guessing game built around mimicking Junichi Wanima's blank expressions, floating wildly wrong readings until Iemon snaps at them to concentrate on the matches ahead. When Imamura suggests a strategy session, old wounds reopen. Raichi, still bitter over a former teammate's treachery, storms up to Kuon and throttles him, with Igaguri and Naruhaya keen to pile on before Isagi drags them apart.

Isagi argues that the roster cannot afford to lose Kuon against Team V, since going a man short would sink them, yet Kuon flatly refuses to help. As the group's leading scorer, he insists elimination cannot touch him even in defeat. Kunigami counters that three more finishes would push his own tally to four and overtake him, a boast Kuon laughs off given the eleven-against-ten disadvantage. Kuon then bares his reasoning: he once chased the World Cup too, until his old teammates gave up on the dream one after another and dragged him down, so now he will betray them rather than let that history repeat.

Bachira wonders how a tie among top scorers would be settled; Chigiri points to fewest yellow cards, then asks what breaks a deadlock there as well. Ego materializes on the monitor to answer that overall Blue Lock ranking decides it, and the refreshed board places Kuon atop Team Z ahead of Chigiri and Isagi. When Raichi rages that a traitor sits highest, Ego notes the tally counts only goals regardless of method, even while branding Kuon the vilest scum in the facility. His larger point is that rather than knifing one another, the team must decode the formula that manufactures goals on repeat, the way every elite striker owns a personal method. Ego signs off, Raichi warns Kuon into a wheelchair should he interfere, and a still-uncertain Isagi sprints away to Team X to beg help from Baro, the fifth stratum's ten-goal front-runner.

Kuon stands as Team Z's top marksman, a status he traces to being abandoned by former teammates. Ego frames the day's lesson: a striker only repeats goals by grasping every factor that shapes each one, meaning each finisher must uncover a personal scoring formula. Baro is confirmed as the fifth stratum's leading scorer of the First Selection with ten goals to his name.

Goal Formula opens Blue Lock's fourth volume as its second chapter and the 24th release overall, part of the First Selection Arc. It first appeared in issue 2019-9 on January 30, 2019, and was later adapted into the anime's eighth episode.