Portugal lifted their first FIFA U-17 World Cup with a 1-0 victory against Austria in the final of the 2025 edition at Doha’s Khalifa International Stadium in Qatar, Al Jazeera reports.
Anisio Cabral netted the only goal of the game in the 32nd minute on Thursday, handing the Portuguese the win in a match that saw both sides competing in the final at this level for the first time.
Johannes Moser of Austria was the leading scorer in the tournament coming into the final with eight goals, but it was substitute Daniel Frauscher who came closest to levelling for his side when striking the post with a low drive in the 85th minute, seconds after coming on as a substitute.
Moser’s closest rival for the Golden Boot was Cabral, who finished with seven goals following his tap after a swift Portuguese passing move, which was enough to seal the win for the reigning European U-17 champions.
Italy beat Brazil 4-2 on penalties in the third-place playoff earlier in the day following a goalless draw after normal time.
Italy were beaten 2-0 by Austria in the semifinals, while Brazil lost 6-5 on penalties to Portugal in their last-four clash.
6 Comments
So let’s get this straight: if Nigeria and Ghana — the two eternal giants of youth football, the only African nations with a proven, repeatable blueprint for producing world beaters — cannot win this cup anymore, then honestly no African team ever will, even if FIFA decides to give Africa 20 slots?
And yet CAF, in its infinite confusion, has designed a qualifying format where both teams are squeezed into the same WAFU-B slaughterhouse, ensuring that year after year one eliminates the other. Sometimes both get eliminated. How can a continent claim it wants competitiveness and still trap its two biggest developmental engines in a single choke point? It is ridiculous. It is self-sabotage. It is a direct assault on the future of West African football.
But the biggest embarrassment is not CAF — it is the NFF, who have shown zero creativity, zero resistance, zero strategy, and zero shame. They have completely destroyed the only reliable pipeline that consistently produced global-class players for Nigeria. The U-17 team was our factory, our identity, our legacy, the only Nigerian team I’m never tired of watching — and they have reduced that system to dust.
How do you explain that a five-time world champion, the most successful country in the history of the competition, has qualified for the U-17 WC only once in 10 years? Once. In ten years. For a nation that built entire generations of Super Eagles — 1994, 1996, 2013, and even the current team — from this very pipeline, this situation is beyond disgraceful. It is unacceptable. It is national football negligence of the highest order.
For this alone, Musa Gusau and his entire NFF board have no moral, professional, or administrative right to remain in office. They have presided over the collapse of the only part of our football that still worked.
And now the questions they cannot hide from.
How can a nation with five world titles suddenly become incapable of even escaping its regional qualifiers?
What exactly is the NFF’s youth development plan — or is there none?
Who benefits from this failure, and why has no one been held accountable?
How can CAF justify a qualifying structure that kills the continent’s best developmental machines?
And why are Nigerian stakeholders and commentators not screaming louder about this disaster?
If these questions make the NFF uncomfortable, good — because Nigerian football is dying right under their watch, and the silence is becoming part of the problem.
Lmao…Chatgpt
We are still missing next year’s edition as well. The earliest we can qualify for the yearly competition is 2027. In the eye of NFF, it’s at a standstill.
How can one give what one hasn’t?
By the way, I think CAF isn’t to blame for the qualification process.
For me it’s even a fair way because it could have been worse. The current process to qualify for afcon under 17 is as follows
North Zone (5 countries) – 3 spots
Wafu A (9 countries) – 3 spots
Wafu B (7 countries) – 2 spots
Central Zone (8 countries)-2spots
Central East Zone (10 countries) – 3spots
South zone or Cosafa (14 countries) – 3 spots
West Africans have 5 slots overall.
If Nigeria still couldn’t take advantage of a more narrow qualifying process, then an expanded way will be obliterating.
Like you write, NFF is to be blamed. And next September to kick them out of office can’t come sooner
@Sly, slots should be awarded strictly on performance, especially in West Africa. WAFU A has no business holding three slots. Apart from Mali or may be Guinea, that entire zone has zero meaningful pedigree at the U17 World Cup. Again, Senegal and South Africa keep cruising through their zones simply because the competition around them is weak.
Meanwhile, WAFU B—easily the most brutally competitive zone, where Nigeria and Ghana share seven titles and nations like Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast have real history—gets only two slots. How is that In other zones, the qualifiers are predictable because the quality gap is laughably wide. But in WAFU B, the battle is outright warfare, with four or five nations capable of qualifying in any cycle. In fact, almost every country in WAFU Zone B has reached the FIFA U17 World Cup at one time or another. And I’m certain that if CAF abolished this zonal system and went with merit alone, at least four teams from WAFU B would routinely make it to FIFA tournaments. That’s exactly why the zone deserves more slots.
Yet we have the bizarre case of North Africa—only five countries, thin pedigree at U17 level, but somehow they walk away with three slots. Why? Is this suddenly because Morocco will be hosting the tournament for the next few editions? And when Morocco is done hosting, will that inflated slot quietly shrink back to two? And who becomes the beneficiary when the political favour runs out?
For a zone with barely five members and no deep U17 legacy to have more representation than WAFU B—with seven countries and seven world titles—is absurd. These are the structural injustices people like Amaju Pinnick, sitting comfortably in FIFA and CAF corridors, should be fighting against. But will he? Does he even care? And more importantly, who exactly is benefiting from this skewed, politically loaded slot allocation—and why is nobody in CAF from WAFU B bold enough to confront it?
I was checking some of the stats and records of the world cup and Nigeria was prominent.
Apart from Senegal, no other of the other 9 African nations topped their respective groups in spite of the expansion to 48 teams.
That’s embarrassing.
Gusau and Pinnick are after their pockets because there is nothing influential of their positions.
Maybe CAF in its thinking want to expose more nations to dream big and aim higher so that we can imitate what Morocco did in Qatar 2022 in the next couple of years.
I don’t work for CAF but I think logistics also played a part in determining how participants are known for their Afcon for a yearly world cup (under 12 months).
Since we don’t have a thinking NFF to suggest wonderful proposals to CAF on competition format – since our reps are lame ducks, let’s hope when 2027 qualifiers start by mid next year, we’d have pooled likely talents to blend.
As it stands, under 17 and under 20 male and female teams don’t exist – until qualifiers for the flamingoes that olowookere has been removed as coach since, resume in a couple of months.
Sound it out!
Sound it loud!
NFF ONIGBESE MUST GO!!!