The 2023 OFC U-17 Championship will be the 19th edition of the OFC U-16/U-17 Championship, the biennial international youth football championship organised by the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) for the men's under-16/under-17 national teams of Oceania.
The OFC announced on 4 March 2022 that the 2021 OFC U-17 Championship (originally the 2020 OFC U-16 Championship), which would have been hosted by Fiji, had been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Fiji would be retained to host the next edition in 2022.[2]
The top two teams of the tournament will qualify for the 2023 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Peru as the OFC representatives. New Zealand are the seven-time defending champions, having won the most recently played edition in 2018.
10 of the 11 FIFA-affiliated national teams from the OFC are eligible to enter the tournament. Solomon Islands were excluded from taking part by the OFC Disciplinary and Ethics Committee in regards to the 2018 OFC U-16 Championship.[3]
Starting from 2020, male youth tournaments no longer have a four-team qualifying stage, and all teams compete in one tournament.[4]
Note: All appearance statistics include those in the qualifying stage (2016 and 2018).
The draw for the group stage was conducted at the OFC Home of Football on the 28th October 2022. Teams were seeded into three pots based on their 2018 OFC U-16 Championship ranking.[3]
Due to groups having a different number of teams, the results against the fourth-placed teams in four-team groups will not be considered for this ranking.
American Samoa
Cook Islands
Fiji (hosts)
New Caledonia
New Zealand
Papua New Guinea
Samoa
Tahiti
Tonga
Vanuatu