The 2018 CONCACAF Men’s U-20 Championship crammed 80 games and 382 goals into its first 10 days. The pace should be a little less frantic from here: 34 teams have been whittled down to just six for the Qualification Stage of the tournament.
The six groups of the Group Stage advanced just one team each to this phase of the competition. The group winners were exactly the teams predicted by the tournament’s seeding: every group was won by its top seed. This tournament has been short on upsets, though the long-term ambition behind making the regional men’s U-20 tournament open to every CONCACAF member association is to foster a stronger set of U-20 programs across the region and hopefully a much more competitive tournament in years to come.