Colombia U20

There is no founding date to speak of, because the under-20 side is not really a club in its own right — it is an age bracket run by the Federación Colombiana de Fútbol, standing in for whichever generation happens to be coming through. What it has instead of a birth certificate is a record of near-misses turned, eventually, into finishes worth keeping: third place at the FIFA U-20 World Cup in 2003, and again in 2025, more than two decades apart, bracketing a run of continental titles at the South American U-20 Championship in 1987, 2005 and 2013.

The shirt carries the same yellow, blue and red as the senior team, and the same nicknames too — Los Cafeteros, La Tricolor — because this is less a separate identity than a rehearsal room for one. That is what gives the honours list at Toulon, the Maurice Revello Tournament, its weight: titles in 1999, 2000 and 2011 came at a tournament built precisely to show what a country's next wave looks like against the rest of the world's.

The clearest evidence of that is the names who passed through on their way to somewhere else. Radamel Falcao came up through the same ranks, long before Monaco or Porto, in the years when Colombian football was rebuilding the pipeline that would eventually put both of them on the senior roster.