India U20

The under-20 side answers to the All India Football Federation, and its badge, the Ashoka Chakra set against a football, has carried Indian youth football into Asian and South Asian tournaments since 1963, when the team first travelled to the AFC Youth Championship. Eleven years later it returned from that competition with the closest thing to a crown it has known: a 2–2 draw with Iran in the 1974 final left the title shared between the two sides.

What the Blue Colts have built since sits closer to home. South Asia has become their proving ground, with Pakistan and Bangladesh the opponents who matter most, and the age-group titles have piled up against them: an under-18 championship in 2019, the under-20 crown in 2022 under Shanmugam Venkatesh, then back-to-back under-19 wins in 2023 and 2025. Beyond the region, the side has occasionally troubled bigger names — Argentina's under-20s lost 2–1 to them at the 2018 COTIF Tournament in Spain, a result Floyd Pinto's group carried into an OFC Youth Development Tournament win over Tahiti the following year.

There is no single ground to speak of; the squad trains in rotation through Kolkata, Goa, Bengaluru and Chennai, assembling and dispersing as call-ups demand rather than settling anywhere long enough to call it home. The point of the whole exercise is a team stitched together season by season, still measured against that afternoon in 1974 when it first shared a continent's title.