Azkals

By the time the 2023 season ended, Azkals Development Team had no league left to play in: the club withdrew from the Philippine Football League that May and folded into the newly launched Azkals Development Academy, sending most of its squad on to CF Manila. For three seasons before that, though, it had served exactly the purpose the Philippine Football Federation built it for in 2020 — a professional dressing room where young players from the national team pool could get first-team minutes instead of waiting for a call-up.

The clearest sign of what that meant came in 2021, when the team reached the final of the Copa Paulino Alcantara and lost 1–0 to Kaya–Iloilo. Along the way they had put nine past Mendiola 1991 in a single group-stage match, the kind of scoreline a development side is supposed to run up against opponents rather than struggle past. A year earlier, in the shortened 2020 Bubble Season of the Philippine Football League, they had finished third.

Stephan Schröck spent part of that spell on the books as a playing coach, a senior international lending a settling presence to a squad built almost entirely of academy graduates and trialists such as Jarvey Gayoso and Mar Diano. Known to supporters as the Young Azkals, or simply Young Blood, the team never had a rival to speak of — a development side has no history to renew, only players to pass through.

Its matches were played at the PFF National Training Center in Carmona, Cavite, a compact ground holding around a thousand spectators, built for producing footballers rather than housing crowds.