Brazil calls up 16-year-old for first Junior FootGolf World Cup

Brazil’s FootGolf pipeline just produced a marker that is hard to ignore: Dagner Vinícius Kuhn, 16, still in high school, has been called up to represent Brazil at the first Junior FootGolf World Cup. For Sociedade Thalia, the selection is bigger than one teenager’s breakthrough. It points to a club structure that is now sending players into both junior and senior national-team territory.

Sociedade Thalia said in its June 17 post that the news had arrived a few days earlier and brought pride to club members, while making Kuhn happy. That reaction tells you how rare this still is in FootGolf. A school-age player does not often get a national-team call in a sport that is still building its age-group ladder, so this one lands as a genuine development story, not just a feel-good note.

The tournament itself gives the selection real weight. The Junior FootGolf World Cup is scheduled for July 16-19 in Gahlenz, near Dresden, in Saxony, Germany, and it is being organized by the International FootGolf Federation. Thirty countries from every continent are expected, which makes the event more than a novelty. It is the sport’s first serious junior world stage, the kind of competition that can turn scattered youth participation into a lasting pathway.

That matters in Brazil, where the sport’s growth has depended on clubs creating their own internal pipelines. Sociedade Thalia has already shown it can do that at the senior level. On May 22, the club said eight Thalia FootGolf athletes had been selected to represent Brazil at the senior FootGolf World Cup in Acapulco, Mexico, where teams from 29 countries took part. Kuhn’s junior call-up now suggests the club is not only producing adults ready for the world stage, but teenagers who are arriving early.

The broader international calendar underlines how far FootGolf has come. The official FootGolf World Championship Acapulco 2026 site describes that event as the sport’s pinnacle and lists 1,240 players and 64 teams, with individual competition from May 27-June 1 and team play from June 2-7. Against that backdrop, Kuhn’s selection is more than a local headline. It is proof that FootGolf is starting to build something it has needed for years: a junior ladder that can feed the senior game, and a Brazilian club culture strong enough to push a 16-year-old from school sports into a national jersey.