AFC prepares draws for new two-tier Champions League club competitions

August 12 – The draw for the top two tiers of the reformatted and rebranded Asian Champions League competitions will be held on Friday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The AFC Champions League Elite will see Asia’s best 24 clubs compete in the maiden edition of the revamped competition which will for the first time in an AFC club competition, will begin with a league format composed of 12 teams in each of the West and East regions.
Scheduled to be played between September 16, 2024 and February 19, 2025, each team will face eight different opponents within its region in the form of four home and four away matches.
The top eight finishers in each League will progress to the Round of 16, scheduled for March 2025, which will be followed by a centralised finals from the quarter finals stage, all to be played in Saudi Arabia between April 25 and May 4, 2025.

For the first time teams from the east and west regions will meet at the quarter final stage. Previously teams from the two regions had not met until the final.

The draw line-up – comprising 22 teams that qualified directly and two Preliminary Stage winners – will be placed into two pots within each region, as below:

ACLTwo

The 32 clubs in the AFC Champions League Two (ACL Two) 2024/25 campaign is the largest number of teams in any of the Asian Football Confederation’s club competitions.

The new second-tier men’s tournament will comprise eight groups – four West, four East – of four teams each for the Group Stage, which will be played in a home-and-away round-robin format from September 17 to December 5.

The top two finishers from each group advance to the Round of 16, to be played in February 2025. This will be followed by the Quarter-finals on March 4, 2025 and Semi-finals in April 2025, before a single-leg Final on May 17, 2025.

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Source link : https://www.insideworldfootball.com/2024/08/12/afc-prepares-draws-new-two-tier-champions-league-club-competitions/

Author : Paul Nicholson

Publish date : 2024-08-12 08:41:09

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