She spent a Covid lockdown with him on Madeira and gave birth to their third child in Japan while he was in Glasgow.
Daizen Maeda’s wife is a Japanese woman four years his senior, and when he first asked her out, she thought the age gap was too big. His mother only learned about the knock-back this year, when she read his autobiography, Gamushara. She told the magazine Gendai Business in June that it had come as a surprise.
The couple married on 10 July 2018, when Maeda was 20 and playing for Matsumoto Yamaga in Japan’s second tier. They have three children:
| Child | Born | Age now |
|---|---|---|
| Soyo (daughter) | June 2019 | 7 |
| Tensei (son) | August 2021 | 5 |
| Raikou (son) | May 2025 | 1 |
Maeda doesn’t name his wife in interviews, and Matsumoto didn’t name her when it announced the wedding. The same Gendai Business article reported that the No 38 he has worn since joining Yokohama F Marinos in 2020 is a play on her name. Maeda, who turned 29 last month, was wearing it when he scored his first Premier League goal for Ipswich Town, at Manchester City on 17 October.
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Starting a family at Matsumoto
The club’s announcement, on 14 July 2018, carried a few lines from Maeda: “Now that I have a family to protect, I’ll keep working hard with even more responsibility and determination.”
Their daughter, Soyo, was born the following June, and in his statement through the club Maeda thanked his wife:
“I’m really grateful to my wife for giving birth to a healthy baby… Thank you for making me a dad!”
Lockdown on Madeira
A few weeks after Soyo was born, Maeda joined Marítimo on loan and moved to Madeira, the Portuguese island in the Atlantic. By April 2020 he was living there with his wife and their 10-month-old daughter, under Covid restrictions that kept people indoors. He described their life in a column for the Japan Football Association.
“The only Japanese on this island are the three of us,” he wrote. “There’s no interpreter either, so day-to-day life is hard in a lot of ways. I’ve got used to the shopping, but I do worry when I think about what would happen if we had to go to hospital.”
His wife put Soyo to bed each night, and Maeda made sure he was involved until then, reading to her from picture books he had packed for Portugal. The couple cooked, sometimes together and sometimes with Maeda taking over. One day they made a cheesecake and ate it with their daughter at snack time.
The decision to leave Europe, he told the Daily Mail in 2025, was one he made “for the family”, and without Covid he would have stayed in Europe. They were back in Japan by the summer of 2020.
Daizen Maeda’s family in Glasgow
Their son Tensei was born in August 2021, while Maeda was at Yokohama F Marinos, and in January 2022 Ange Postecoglou, his former manager there, brought him to Celtic.
Maeda’s Anpanman goal celebration, copying the bread-headed hero of a Japanese children’s cartoon, was something he did for Soyo. In a Japanese TV interview that September, he was asked whether his daughter was getting bored of it. “It’s more my wife who’s getting bored of it,” he said. “She’s like, ‘You’d better stop the Anpanman.'” Whether he kept it going, he added, was for him and his wife to talk over.
“I can’t live in a place where my family doesn’t settle well,” he told Celtic TV when he signed a new contract in July 2023. In February 2025 Soyo and Tensei walked out with him before a Scottish Cup tie against Raith Rovers. He scored a hat-trick in a 5-0 win, and later thanked the Raith players on X “for being so kind to my daughter and son”.
The week Raikou was born
In the spring of 2025 Maeda’s wife was in Japan, pregnant with their third child. He flew out in late April, hoping to be there for the birth. The baby was late, and he came back to Glasgow in time for the Old Firm derby at Ibrox on Sunday 4 May. In stoppage time, with the score at 1-1, he went through on goal and had his shot saved. Brendan Rodgers, who revealed that Maeda had trained only once that week, asked afterwards for “a bit of leeway”.
Raikou was born two days later, on 6 May. When Maeda was named the football writers’ player of the year in mid-May, he still hadn’t met him. “I have a baby boy,” he said. “I’ve seen him on video calls. I haven’t seen him face to face yet, so I just want to go into the off-season and see him.”
This year, in his words and his mother’s
Celtic marked Maeda’s 200th appearance in March with a Japanese-language interview on the club’s YouTube channel. Asked how he looked back on his years in Europe, he said: “My family has supported me. Without that support, I never thought I’d do this well here, score so many goals and play so many games. I want to thank my family.”
On 7 May he posted on Instagram for Raikou’s first birthday: “Happy 1st Birthday, my boy.”
He was asleep when Japan named their World Cup squad in May, resting for Celtic’s final league game with the title at stake. “My wife came in to say congratulations around the time I usually get up, and that’s how I found out,” he told reporters at a Tokyo press event for Gamushara on 28 May. It had been a bit earlier than usual, he added, laughing.
His mother’s interview with Gendai Business followed in June. She gave him full marks as a dad and called him a good husband. However tired he is when he gets home, she said, he cleans the bath and calls the children in for it before hanging out the washing. If his wife is still doing housework when he comes back from a match, he won’t sit down until she does. He may get that from his father, who does housework too, his mother said. His wife has told her: “I’m grateful. It makes me happy.”
Leaving Glasgow
Maeda joined Ipswich from Celtic on 25 July. In his farewell message he thanked “everyone in Glasgow who welcomed and supported my wife and children” and said the city would “forever be our second home”.
“My son loves Celtic so much that he already says he wants to wear the Celtic shirt and play at Celtic Park one day. I truly hope that dream comes true, and I hope our family will be back here again someday.”
Quotes from Japanese sources were translated by Headline Magazine.
