International football competition
The 2019 Africa U-17 Cup of Nations was the 13th edition of the Africa U-17 Cup of Nations (18th edition if tournaments without hosts are included), the biennial international youth football tournament organized by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) for players aged 17 and below. In May 2015, it was decided that the tournament would be hosted by Tanzania.
Four teams of the tournament qualified for the 2019 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Brazil as the CAF representatives. Cameroon won their second title.
Angola and Nigeria qualified for finishing third and fourth in the competition respectively. Defending champions Mali failed to qualify.
Following completion of the tournament, CAF ejected Guinea from the competition, and deleted its results from the records, for fielding players with passports which had a different date of birth to those the players had used in the U-16 age restricted 'International Dream Cup' in Japan. Senegal were given the remaining place at the U-17 World Cup as they had placed behind Guinea during the group stage.
Qualification.
The CAF decided in July 2017 that the format of the qualifying competition should be changed and split according to zones. The qualifiers were played between 19 July and 18 September 2018. At the end of the qualification phase, seven teams joined the hosts Tanzania.
Player eligibility.
Players born 1 January 2002 or later were eligible to participate in the competition.
Qualified teams.
The following eights teams qualified for the final tournament.
"Note: All appearance statistics count only those since the introduction of final tournament in 1995."
Venues.
The matches were played in two venues.
Squads.
Each squad can contain a maximum of 21 players.
Draw.
The draw of the final tournament was held on 20 December 2018, 19:30 EAT (), at the Mlimani City Conference Centre in Dar es Salaam. The eight teams were drawn into two groups of four teams. The hosts Tanzania were seeded in Group A and allocated to position A1, while 2017 third place Guinea were seeded in Group B and allocated to position B1 (2017 champions and runners-up Mali and Ghana did not qualify). The remaining six teams were seeded based on their results in the 2017 Africa U-17 Cup of Nations (final tournament and qualifiers), and drawn to any of the remaining three positions in each group.
Match officials.
A total of 13 referees and 14 assistant referees were appointed for the tournament, including one women referee and two women assistant referees, which is the first time women officials were appointed in a CAF men's tournament.
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Group stage.
The top two teams of each group advance to the semi-finals and qualify for the 2019 FIFA U-17 World Cup.
Teams were ranked according to points (3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 points for a loss), and if tied on points, the following tiebreaking criteria were applied, in the order given, to determine the rankings (Regulations Article 72):
All times are local, EAT ().
Knockout stage.
In the knockout stage, penalty shoot-out (no extra time) was used to decide the winner if necessary (Regulations Article 73).
Awards.
The following awards were given at the conclusion of the tournament:
Qualified teams for FIFA U-17 World Cup.
The following four teams from CAF qualified for the 2019 FIFA U-17 World Cup.
1 Bold indicates champions for that year. "Italic" indicates hosts for that year.
Concerns and controversies.
Guinean Football Federation punishment.
CAF imposed the following penalties on the Guinean Football Federation:
References.
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