The 2017 South American Youth Football Championship (, ) was the 28th edition of the South American Youth Football Championship, a football competition for the under-20 national teams in South America organized by CONMEBOL. It was held in Ecuador from 18 January to 11 February 2017.
Uruguay were crowned champions, and together with Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, which were the top four teams of this tournament, qualified for the 2017 FIFA U-20 World Cup in South Korea.
All ten CONMEBOL member national teams entered the tournament.
Each team may register a squad of 23 players (three of whom must be goalkeepers).
A total of eight venues in seven cities were proposed by FEF in July 2016, days later Latacunga was added as a possible venue. Tulcán was also nominated, but was finally dismissed along with Cuenca, Machala and Portoviejo. Eventually, five venues were confirmed to host the matches, Estadio Bellavista in Ambato, Estadio OlÃÂmpico de Riobamba in Riobamba and Estadio La Cocha in Latacunga for the Group A; Estadio OlÃÂmpico de Ibarra in Ibarra for the Group B while the final stage took place at Estadio OlÃÂmpico Atahualpa in Quito. However, on 5 January 2017, Estadio La Cocha in Latacunga was dropped as refurbishment work was not completed in time.
The referees were:
Originally, the draw was scheduled for 30 November 2016 in Montevideo but had to be postponed due to crash of LaMia Flight 2933 that occurred on 28 November 2016. It was rescheduled to be held on 7 December 2016, 11:00 PYT (), at the CONMEBOL headquarters in Luque, Paraguay. The ten teams were drawn into two groups of five. Ecuador (hosts) and Argentina (title holders) were seeded into Group A and Group B respectively and assigned to position 1 in their group, while the remaining teams were placed into four "pairing pots" according to their results in the 2015 South American U-20 Championship (shown in brackets).
The top three teams in each group advanced to the final stage.
When teams finished level of points, the final rankings were determined according to:
All times local, ECT ().
When teams finished level of points, the final rankings were determined according to the same criteria as the first stage, taking into account only matches in the final stage.
The following four teams from CONMEBOL qualified for the 2017 FIFA U-20 World Cup.