Wales U18

The side fielded now is not a continuous line. Wales first put out an U18 team in 1987, playing Scotland and Northern Ireland early that year and entering qualification for the 1988 UEFA European Under-18 Championship, but the fixture list then went quiet for two decades. It took until 29 March 2021 for the team to play again, against England U18 at Leckwith Stadium — a gap of more than twenty years between international matches at that level.

There has been little to show for it in terms of silverware. The closest the team came was a fourth-place finish at the Nordic Cup U18 in Denmark in 2011. What the age group has produced instead is players: Craig Bellamy and Aaron Ramsey both passed through the Welsh youth system on their way to senior careers, though neither man's specific time at U18 level is set out in detail anywhere.

Wales U18 carries the senior team's colours, red shirts with white shorts, and the Welsh federation's own nickname for the group, the Young Dragons, translates the training base at its heart: Dragon Park in Newport, the national football development centre, is where the squad works between matches. Games themselves move around — Cardiff City Stadium has hosted them, as has the Vale Resort — so the team trains in one place and plays wherever a fixture takes it, without a single ground it can call its own.