2025 AFC U-17 Asian Cup

The 2025 AFC U-17 Asian Cup was the 20th edition of the AFC U-17 Asian Cup (including previous editions of the AFC U-16 Championship and AFC U-17 Championship), the biennial international youth football championship organised by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) for the men's under-17 national teams of Asia.

On 24 May 2024, the AFC announced that Saudi Arabia would host the tournament.^[1] It was the first of the four consecutive AFC U-17 Asian Cup held in Saudi Arabia, preceding the 2026, 2027 and 2028 tournament, which also held in Saudi Arabia.

A total of 16 teams played in the tournament. The top eight teams of the tournament (all quarter-finalists) qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Qatar as the AFC representatives, besides Qatar who qualified automatically as the host.^[2]

Japan were the title holders, having won their fourth title in 2023. They were eliminated in the quarter-finals by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia then lost the final to Uzbekistan, who also defeated them in the group stage, despite the latter having two players dismissed in the first half.

Qualification matches were played between 19 and 27 October 2024.^[3]

A total of 16 teams including hosts Saudi Arabia qualified for the final tournament.

¹ Bold indicates champions for that year. Italic indicates hosts for that year.

Four stadiums in two host cities were used for the tournament.

Referees

Assistant referees

The draw of the final tournament was held on 23 January 2025 at the AFC House in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The 16 teams were drawn into four groups of four teams, with the teams seeded according to their final rankings across the previous three editions (2016, 2018, 2023), with the hosts Saudi Arabia automatically seeded and assigned to Position A1 in the draw.^[5]

Players born between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2010 were eligible to compete in the tournament. Each team had to register a squad of minimum 18 players and maximum 23 players, minimum three of whom must have been goalkeepers (Regulations Articles 26.3).^[6]

The group winners and runners-up advanced to the quarter-finals and qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup.

Tiebreakers

Teams were ranked according to points (3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 points for a loss), and if tied on points, the following tie-breaking criteria were applied, in the order given, to determine the rankings:^[6]

1. Points in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
2. Goal difference in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
3. Goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
4. If more than two teams are tied, and after applying all head-to-head criteria above, a subset of teams are still tied, all head-to-head criteria above are reapplied exclusively to this subset of teams;
5. Goal difference in all group matches;
6. Goals scored in all group matches;
7. Penalty shoot-out if only two teams were tied and they met in the last round of the group;
8. Disciplinary points (yellow card = 1 point, red card as a result of two yellow cards = 3 points, direct red card = 3 points, yellow card followed by direct red card = 4 points);
9. Drawing of lots.

All match times are in local time, AST (UTC+3).

In the knockout stage, if a match was level at the end of 90 minutes of normal playing time, the match would be decided by a penalty shoot-out to determine the winner; no extra time would be played.^[6]

All eight teams that reached the knockout stage qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup.

The following awards were given at the conclusion of the tournament:

There were 101 goals scored in 31 matches, for an average of 3.26 goals per match.

5 goals

4 goals

3 goals

2 goals

1 goal

The following nine teams from AFC qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup; Qatar qualified automatically as the hosts.

¹ Bold indicates champions for that year. Italic indicates hosts for that year.

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