Chile's Under-17 women's national team plays Australia this Monday, October 19, at 15.00, at the World Cup in Morocco. The match is being played on pitch 4 of the Mohammed VI Football Complex in Rabat and opens Group F, which also includes Mexico and Spain.
According to La Tercera, the goal for the generation of Catalina Muñoz, Antonella Martínez, Amparo Abarca and Oriana Cristancho is to improve on Chile's best-ever performance and advance past the group stage. Rabat is the main host city of a tournament that, since 2025, has been held every year.
It will be Chile's third World Cup in this category. At Trinidad and Tobago 2010 the team finished with three defeats, and at India 2022 it earned its first win. This time the team qualified after a last-gasp win over Ecuador at the South American Championship in Paraguay, according to Cooperativa.
The build-up gave positive signs. On a tour of Morocco, La Roja beat the hosts 1-0 and New Zealand 2-1. Australia arrives after reaching the semifinals of the Asian championship in China, where it lost 4-0 to Japan.
The head coach is Ecuadorian Vanessa Arauz, 37, born in Quito. She took charge of the youth women's national team in 2024 after working at Colo Colo and Universidad Católica. In May, after qualifying, she told La Tercera that they would not promise to win the World Cup: "this is part of a process". She added that the goal was to have a good showing and, if possible, advance to the next round.
Arauz already knows what it is like to coach at a World Cup. In 2011 she graduated as a coach from the Instituto Tecnológico Superior of the Ecuadorian Football Federation. She was the first woman to do so and earned the second-highest grade in her class (19.54). In 2013 she took over Ecuador's senior women's national team.
With that team she achieved Ecuador's first-ever qualification for the Canada 2015 World Cup. There she became the youngest coach to lead a team at a World Cup, women's or men's, at 26 years and 127 days. She surpassed Argentina's Juan José Tramutola, who coached in 1930 at 27 years and 267 days. She received Guinness World Record certification in August 2015.
On the field, that experience was tough. Ecuador lost 6-0 to Cameroon, 10-1 to Switzerland and 1-0 to Japan, finishing last in its group without a point, with one goal scored and 17 conceded.
Her ties to Chilean football began in 2020 at Colo Colo, where she reached the semifinals of the Torneo de Transición in the middle of the pandemic. After a spell at Independiente del Valle, she returned to Chile in 2022 to join UC (Universidad Católica). In the club's youth divisions she reached seven finals and won four titles: three with the Under-19s and one with the Under-16s.
Eleven years after Canada, Arauz returns to a World Cup. After the opener against Australia, Chile still faces Mexico and Spain, matches that will decide whether this squad earns the country's first qualification for the knockout stage.
