What is Daily Sports?
Daily Sports is a daily sports newspaper published by Daily Sports Co., Ltd., a company of the Kobe Shimbun group. The parent's group company list describes Daily Sports Co. as engaged in the sports newspaper and electronic media, with two further group companies — Daily Sports Quality and Daily Sports Press Center — handling the daily paper, the racing paper and the associated print and publishing work.[3] The Kobe Shimbun itself is Hyogo prefecture's local daily, founded on 11 February 1898, with 629 employees as of 1 January 2026.[1]
The paper's site, Daily Sports online, sits at daily.co.jp and carries sections for baseball, the Hanshin Tigers, the Hiroshima Carp, football, general sport, golf, combat sports, entertainment, social news, fishing, horse racing and boat racing.[2] Its content-syndication business is run through the Kobe Shimbun's digital division, which licenses Daily Sports news and photographs to corporate sites and signage.[4]
What does Daily Sports cover?
The paper's front page in September 2026 was organised around professional baseball, with standing sections for two clubs — the Hanshin Tigers and the Hiroshima Carp — alongside general baseball, football, golf, combat sports, entertainment and social news, and a large racing area covering horse racing, boat racing and keirin.[2] Racing is also a print business in its own right: the company publishes the racing paper Uma Saburo, sold through convenience-store print terminals nationwide, and runs the tipping service Umaya.[2]
Alongside reporting, the paper attaches itself to participation events: its front page in September 2026 carried recruitment for the Ono Half Marathon of 6 December 2026, whose tournament chairman is a former professional baseball player.[2] The company sells no broadcast rights and runs no television service; its video output is carried on the parent group's broadcasters, Sun Television and Radio Kansai, which are separate companies in the same group.[3]
What are Daily Sports' reach and standing?
Japan's sports newspapers are counted as a class by the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, whose October 2025 survey put them at 1,494,416 copies, a fall of 10.9 per cent on the year, within a national total of 24,868,122 copies across 104 daily titles.[5] The association's series shows the class at 2,637,148 copies as recently as 2020.[6] No audited circulation for Daily Sports itself is published on the group's site.
What the group does publish is the parent's audited figure — 320,432 morning copies and 80,975 evening copies of the Kobe Shimbun for July to December 2025, on Japan Audit Bureau of Circulations numbers — and a statement about the sports title's distribution.[1] The Kobe Shimbun's corporate pages state that the group develops Daily Sports on a national scale, and describe it as a sports paper known for favouring the Hanshin club.[7] That is the parent company's own characterisation of its title, and it is the clearest statement of the paper's editorial position available from a primary source.
Since when?
The Kobe Shimbun's company history dates Daily Sports to 1 August 1948 and describes it as the first daily sports paper in the Kansai region.[8] The title was published by a separate company for most of its history. On 1 March 2010 the Kobe Shimbun absorbed the Daily Sports company by merger, and on 1 December 2012 a new Daily Sports Co., Ltd. was established, which is the publisher named in the group's current company list.[8] [3]
The parent's own dates run further back and explain the group around it. The Kobe Shimbun was founded on 11 February 1898; its head office was destroyed by fire in the 1918 rice riots and again in the Kobe air raid of 17 March 1945, and the Kobe Shimbun Kaikan building collapsed in the Great Hanshin earthquake of 17 January 1995, after which the paper published without interruption with the help of the Kyoto Shimbun.[8] The group's electronic edition, Kobe Shimbun NEXT, opened on 1 November 2012, a month before the present Daily Sports company was formed.[8]
Why does Daily Sports matter in Japan's sport?
Daily Sports is the Kansai entry in a national sports-daily market, and the only one of the national titles published from Kobe rather than Tokyo, Osaka or Nagoya.[8] [3] Its parent states plainly what its identity rests on — a paper known for favouring the Hanshin club, distributed across the country — and that identity is visible in the site's structure, where the Hanshin Tigers have a standing section of their own.[7] [2]
For a reader weighing coverage, the ownership is the point to note: the Kobe Shimbun, a prefectural daily, owns the sports paper, the racing paper, a terrestrial television station and a radio station in the same group.[3] Coverage of Kansai sport across those outlets is coverage by one owner rather than several. Against that, the paper is one of the small number of Japanese sports dailies that sells nationally, which makes an appearance in it a piece of evidence about national, not regional, visibility.[7] [5]
References
- The Kobe Shimbun — company profile, ABC circulation July to December 2025. Accessed September 2026.
- Daily Sports online — site front and sections. Accessed September 2026.
- The Kobe Shimbun — group company list, naming Daily Sports Co., Sun Television and Radio Kansai. Accessed September 2026.
- Daily Sports — corporate content-licensing page. Accessed September 2026.
- Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association — total circulation 24,868,122, October 2025 survey, published 23 December 2025. Accessed September 2026.
- Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association — circulation series 1970 to 2025. Accessed September 2026.
- The Kobe Shimbun — corporate site, group description of Daily Sports. Accessed September 2026.
- The Kobe Shimbun — corporate motto and company history (社是・社史). Accessed September 2026.