Big Project Nine: UEFA U-17 EURO, Matchday 3

Our scouting round-up of the third round of 2024 U-17 EURO games.

The group stages are a wrap… and with not too many big surprises. Two very good teams were always going to have to be knocked out of Group D — those two teams are France and Spain.

Outside of that though, we’ve probably got a set of quarter-finals that would’ve been expected. Those matches will be:

Czech Republic — Denmark
Austria — Serbia
Portugal — Poland
Italy — England

It’s great to see some different nations at this phase of the tournament, both a result of some very interesting Elite Round and group stage draws. But we are seeing some major progress from nations like Serbia, who are now routinely making solid runs at European youth international tournaments.

From here, it’s hard to pick a winner. The Czechs and Italians both emerged with three wins from their three group games, although England, Portugal, Austria and Serbia all played some stretches of scintillating football.

Again, what we do have is a nice crop of players emerging, especially in the attacking department, with a collection of big name, big reputation strikers continuing to emerge before our eyes. Alongside that, there has been quite an impressive spread of centre-back talent, further leaning into our theory of players in that position starting to kick on earlier than ever before — and not just as ball-players, but as genuine all-round athletic freaks too.

Now let’s tuck into the last group of games, with advanced apologies for not being able to hit all the MD3 matches. Sometimes life gets in the way…

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