Chelsea forward Fernando Torres has revealed that one of the reasons he took up football was because of a Japanese cartoon called Captain Tsubasa.

The Spain international is currently in the Asian country for the Blues' FIFA Club World Cup campaign.

"I remember when I was a kid, we couldn't find the signal really well on TV, but everyone in school was talking about this cartoon about football, from Japan," the Daily Mail quotes him as saying.

"It was a series called Oliver y Benji in Spain, and in Japan it was Captain Tsubasa, and these two young players started as youth team players, got into the national team, won the World Cup, and moved to Barcelona and Bayern Munich, then moved to Europe, so it was like a dream.

"I started playing football because of this, and because my brother forced me, and I loved the cartoon. I wanted to be Oliver, because he played out on the field and Benji was the goalkeeper. That was the first contact I had with Japan."

Torres started his career at Atletico Madrid before joining Liverpool in 2007, and moved to Chelsea in January 2011.