Athletics national side

Turkey U17

National team · Turkey

«U17 National Team»

38 Matches

17 wins

8 draws

13 losses

72–59 Goals

+13 Difference

1.9 Scored per game

Form W W L W D W

There is no founding board for a side like this, no gates to open on a matchday morning — the Turkish Football Federation simply pulls together whichever boys born in the right year look best, sends them out under the federation's own colours, and starts again the following season. The earliest recorded fixture traces back to a 2-2 draw with Romania on 10 August 1992, and the shirt has stayed red and white ever since, even as every face inside it changes.

The team trains at the TFF Riva facility in Beykoz, on the Istanbul side of the Bosphorus, a complex built around eight pitches that opened in July 2014 and gives the federation somewhere to camp its youth sides away from the city's stadiums.

What the age group is judged on, more than any one tournament, is what it produces afterwards. The 2005 European Under-17 Championship, won by Turkey, sent Nuri Şahin into a Borussia Dortmund shirt within a couple of years and on to Real Madrid; the same squad handed Caner Erkin a route through Inter Milan. That tournament remains the only one Turkey has actually won at this level, though the side backed it up with a fourth-place finish at the FIFA U-17 World Championship the same year and a quarter-final run in 2009. A dozen years later, in 2017, they reached the semi-finals of the European Under-17s again without going all the way. More recently the shirt was still worth watching for a different reason: Arda Güler wore it before Real Madrid came calling for him too.

Results at this level swing hard from one camp to the next — a 1-3 defeat to Venezuela's under-17s in June 2025 sits in the record alongside the tournament wins, because that is what youth football looks like. The pitches at Riva hold a capacity of 1,500.

Latest results

Fixtures and results

29 Sep	Friendlies	Ukraine U17 A	2:0	W
21 Mar	UEFA U17 Championship - Qualification	Spain U17 H	0:0	D
18 Mar	UEFA U17 Championship - Qualification	Northern Ireland U17 H	4:0	W
15 Mar	UEFA U17 Championship - Qualification	Scotland U17 A	0:2	L
22 Jan	Friendlies	North Macedonia U17 H	2:1	W
20 Jan	Friendlies	North Macedonia U17 H	1:0	W