U-17. Ukraine became a participant in the final tournament of the European Championship for the twelfth time: a historical perspective

13.03.2024 16:00

Photo by uefa.com

Youth team of Ukraine U-17 was the first to make it to the finals of the 2024 European Championship, which will be held in Cyprus in May-June. Wards of Yuriy Moroz and his coaching staff kept company with the owners and they are waiting for 14 more Euro participants to become known.

We will remind you that in October 2023, Ukrainian youths born in 2007 under the leadership of Volodymyr Yezersky successfully completed the first stage of selection (opponents — Germany, Finland, Liechtenstein), despite the lack of time for quality training. And already at the beginning of March, under the leadership of Yuriy Moroz, the elite round of qualifications passed in the same breath: Greece — 2:0, Switzerland — 3:0, Slovakia — 3:0.

For the Ukrainian U-17 national team, this is the 11th final tournament of the European Championship. For a long time, these competitions were classified as U-16 (until 2001 inclusive), but the essence has hardly changed. It was in the 1990s that Ukrainian boys showed the best results at the U-16/U-17 international level - they won bronze awards in Ireland in 1994, after that they played in the final tournaments three times in a row (1996-1998), where they finished third in the group.

After that, in 20 years, our team visited the final parts of the Euro six times. The last time was in 2017 in Croatia, when Serhiy Popov's wards, born in 2000, for the first time in these two decades managed to win at least one victory and rise above the fourth place in the group.

Ukrainian national team U-17 in the final tournaments of the European Championship