Comoros U20

Moroni sits on the edge of the Indian Ocean, a capital built around a port and a football federation with modest reach, and its under-20 side carries the same nickname as the senior team: Les Cœlacanthes, after the fish once thought extinct that still turns up in Comorian waters. The junior team was set up in 2011, giving the federation a pipeline it had not organised before, and it plays in the same green shirts trimmed with yellow, white and red as the senior side, at the Stade Omnisports de Malouzini, a ground with room for just over 10,700 people.

Regional tournaments have not gone their way. Entries in the COSAFA U20 Championship in 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2024 mostly ended at the group stage, and no title has followed from either that competition or the Tournoi Maurice Revello. The one run worth telling came far from home, at the 2021 Arab Cup U-20 in Cairo, where Comoros beat Iraq 4-3 and Lebanon 3-1 to reach the quarter-finals before Tunisia shut them out 1-0.

That squad carried the captain's armband on Yacine Fahad, then with Stade de Reims, and included Adel Mahamoud, a forward who had come through at FC Nantes and later earned a first senior call-up off the back of his form in Egypt. Hamada Jambay had them set up for that run; a former Olympique de Marseille defender who once played internationally for Madagascar, he coached the U20s from June 2021 before moving up to take charge of the Comoros A' side the following year.

No fixture against Madagascar or Mauritius in COSAFA play has hardened into a fixed rivalry — the team's real opponent has been the group stage itself, cleared only once, in Cairo, in 2021.