The 2025 South American U-17 Championship was the 20th edition of the South American U-17 Championship (, ), the biennial international youth football championship organised by CONMEBOL for the men's under-17 national teams of South America. It was held in Colombia from 27 March to 12 April 2025.
The tournament was originally scheduled to be held in Venezuela between 4âÂÂ20 April 2024, before CONMEBOL decided to move it to Colombia due to Venezuela becoming the host of the 2025 South American U-20 Championship. Starting from this edition, the tournament will be played every year in line with the annual cycle implemented by FIFA for the FIFA U-17 World Cup.
As a result of the expansion of the FIFA U-17 World Cup format, seven teams qualified for the U-17 World Cup from this edition onwards, an increase of three berths from the four CONMEBOL teams that previously qualified. The top 7 teams qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Qatar as the CONMEBOL representatives.
Defending champions Brazil successfully retained their title, defeating the hosts Colombia 4âÂÂ1 on penalties following a 1âÂÂ1 draw in the final, which earned them their fourteenth South American U-17 Championship title, the most in the tournamentâÂÂs history. These two teams and the next five best-placed teams â Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia â qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup.
After three years of evaluation and analysis of the proposal submitted in 2021, FIFA announced on 14 March 2024 that its U-17 World Cup would be expanded to 48 teams and would be held annually from 2025, with Qatar being awarded the hosting rights for the next five tournaments. Consequently, CONMEBOL had to modify the format of the South American U-17 Championship to define the 7 places it was awarded in the new slot allocation of the U-17 World Cup. The new format of the South American U-17 Championship is as follows:
Venezuela was originally announced as host country for the tournament by the CONMEBOL President Alejandro DomÃÂnguez during a CONMEBOL Council meeting held on 10 April 2024.
However, on 15 November 2024, CONMEBOL announced some changes to its competition calendar for 2025 in a letter sent to its member associations, moving the South American U-17 Championship to Colombia to replace Venezuela, which went on to host the 2025 South American U-20 Championship after CONMEBOL withdrew Peru's hosting rights of this tournament.
CONMEBOL announced MonterÃÂa and Cartagena as host cities on 6 February 2025, with the Estadio Jaraguay and the Estadio Jaime Morón León being the venues for the matches.
All ten CONMEBOL member national teams entered the tournament.
Each team registered a squad of a minimum of 19 and a maximum of 23 players, including at least 3 goalkeepers. Players born between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2010 (ages 15 to 17) were eligible to compete in the tournament (Regulations Articles 47 and 50).
The draw of the tournament was held on 19 December 2024, 14:15 PYT (), at the CONMEBOL headquarters in Luque, Paraguay. The ten teams were drawn into two groups of five. The hosts Colombia and defending champions Brazil 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 2023 South American U-17 Championship (shown in brackets).
From each pot, the first team drawn was placed into Group A and the second team drawn was placed into Group B. In both groups, teams from pot 1 were allocated in position 2, teams from pot 2 in position 3, teams from pot 3 in position 4 and teams from pot 4 in position 5.
The draw resulted in the following groups:
The top two teams in each group advanced to the final four.
In the group stage, teams were ranked according to points earned (3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 points for a loss). If tied on points, tiebreakers would be applied in the following order (Regulations Article 20):
All match times are local times, COT (), as listed by CONMEBOL.
The final stage was played on a single-elimination basis and consisted of the 5thâÂÂ8th play-offs matches, semi-finals, third place match and final. If a match was level at the end of normal playing time, the winner would be decided directly by a penalty shoot-out (no extra time will be played).
All match times are local times, COT (), as listed by CONMEBOL.
The 5thâÂÂ8th semi-finals matchups were:
Winners qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup.
Winner qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup.
The semi-finals matchups are:
The following seven teams from CONMEBOL qualified for the 2025 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Qatar.