Bahrain U20

The Bahrain Football Association put a side into the AFC Youth Championship as early as 1973.

The nickname, Muharbi Dilmun, reaches back further than the federation itself — to the Dilmun civilisation that once controlled Gulf trade from Bahrain's shores — and it keeps the junior side rhetorically distinct from the senior "Al-Ahmar." The best of that pipeline is still measured against 1986, when Bahrain finished runner-up at the AFC Youth Championship, and 1977, when they took third. Nothing since has matched it: a quarter-final in 1975 and again in 2016, group-stage exits in the years between, and a single appearance at the FIFA U-20 World Cup, in 1987, that did not survive the group stage.

Regionally the record reads a little better. Runners-up at the Gulf U-20 Championship in 2015, third at the Palestine Cup for Youth in 1989, a quarter-final at the Arab U20 Championship in 2020 — enough to keep Qatar and Iraq as the fixtures that matter most, without the age group ever needing a name of its own for the rivalry. The traffic between this level and the first team is the real justification for it: Alaa Hubail moved up to become a senior striker for the best part of a decade, and Jamal Rashid went from the youth ranks to a place in Bahrain's squad at the 2019 AFC Asian Cup.

Matches are played at the Khalifa Sports City Stadium in Isa Town, with the federation's own training complex next door for preparation. The task, as ever with an age-group side, is not a trophy but the next Hubail or Rashid coming through in time for the senior team.