Cambodia U20

Morodok Techo National Stadium seats 60,000 and hosts Cambodia's biggest fixtures, but the youth side splits its home dates with the older, smaller Phnom Penh Olympic Stadium across town, saving the national stadium for the games that draw a crowd. There is no permanent squad living inside either venue: the Football Federation of Cambodia, which traces back to 1933 under the name Fédération Khmère de Football Association, calls the players in only when a tournament is on the calendar, then lets the group disband again.

That pattern of appearing and vanishing goes back further than most Cambodian youth football. The team first showed up at the AFC Youth Championship in 1963, reaching the group stage, and returned in 1972 and 1974 before regional football gave it a steadier outlet: the AFF U-19/U-20 Youth Championship, entered from 2002. In that competition Cambodia reached the semi-finals in 2007, then went one better at the 2018 Hassanal Bolkiah Trophy, where the run ended in the final with a 1-0 defeat to Timor-Leste.

The wins that get talked about, though, came against bigger names. In the 2020 AFC U-19 Championship qualifiers, played in 2019, Cambodia beat Thailand 2-1, a result that stood out precisely because Thailand does not lose these games to Cambodia. Five years later, in qualifying for the 2025 AFC U-20 Asian Cup, the side beat Nepal 4-1 and then Bahrain 1-0, results that pushed the age group further than the senior qualifying record usually allows.

Wearing the same blue kit and the "Angkor Warriors" nickname as the senior team, the group draws its rivalry less from history than from geography: Thailand U20 and Vietnam U20 sit above Cambodia in the regional pecking order, and any result against either still counts as the kind of afternoon worth remembering.