Asian Football Power Renewal

Uzbekistan U17 team celebrates Asian championship - Photo: AFC

In just 7 years, Uzbekistan has won all the youth football titles in Asia.

Uzbekistan Disillusioned the Middle East

Those are the 2018 U23 Asian Championship, 2023 U20 Asian Championship and most recently the 2025 U17 Asian Championship. Not only did Uzbekistan win, they also performed incredibly well throughout the tournament.

In the group stage, they convincingly defeated Thailand, China and Saudi Arabia. In the knockout round, U17 Uzbekistan defeated UAE (3-1) and North Korea (3-0), before creating a shock in the final. Why the shock? Because Uzbekistan had 2 players sent off in the first half, but Saudi Arabia still had to endure the defeat. It should be noted that Saudi Arabia is the host team of the tournament.

Not only that, this is also the generation of players that Saudi Arabia expects in the future because the Middle Eastern country will host the 2034 World Cup. According to calculations, the current U17 generation of Saudi Arabia will play a key role when the home team enters the World Cup in 9 years.

Saudi Arabian football has done almost everything to serve its 10-year plan. From building top academies, spending money to bring in a series of superstars to upgrade the national championship, to actively expanding relationships through European clubs (such as the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund's acquisition of Newcastle FC), Saudi Arabia is considered the Man City, PSG of Asian football at the moment.

In addition to Saudi Arabia, two other Middle Eastern giants, the UAE and Qatar, have also made similar efforts, even pushing forward with the naturalization of players. But in the end, all had to bow down to Uzbekistan.

Go up with technology

Before Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar were defeated by Uzbekistan at the national team level. In the World Cup qualifiers, Uzbekistan surpassed UAE and Qatar to comfortably sit in second place behind Iran in the Group A race.

Uzbekistan needs just one more win to overtake the two Middle Eastern giants to secure a ticket. In Group C, Saudi Arabia is facing the risk of losing both the lead and the fish if they lose the last two rounds. That would be a heavy blow to Saudi Arabia's football ambitions.

Japan, South Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia (not counting Australia) are the four names that have dominated every race in Asian football over the past two decades. The last time a name knocked a team from this group out of the World Cup qualifying round was in 2010, when North Korea beat Iran and Saudi Arabia to qualify.

U17 Saudia Arabia and U17 Iran in the 2025 AFC U17 Championship final - Photo: AFC

FIFA's expansion of the World Cup has given other Asian football nations a chance to rise up and shake up the boring order that has lasted for the past two decades. It was thought that the Middle East, with its financial might, would dominate, but Uzbekistan is now taking the lead.

There have been many analyses of Uzbekistan’s success, including from a sports science perspective. More than 10 years ago, Rustam Mukhamedov, a scientist at Uzbekistan’s Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, studied the genes of Uzbekistan’s champion athletes.

The results of this research were used by the Uzbekistan Government to screen, search for and provide appropriate advice to young athletes with potential. As a result, after a decade, Uzbekistan football and many other sports have produced successive generations of talented young athletes.

Genetic screening technology may be just one of many technological steps that Uzbekistan sports have adopted, learning from Russia to improve their training methods. Accordingly, they use available internal resources and then focus on improving training capacity. This is completely different from the trend of inviting superstars to take a "shortcut" like football in the Middle East.

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HUY DANG

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/doi-moi-quyen-luc-bong-da-chau-a-20250422091746896.htm