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The Asian Football Confederation announced today, Friday, that the inaugural AFC Women’s Champions League will kick off in August next year with a total of 22 teams participating.
The first tournament featured just one team from 22 different countries, including the Asian Women’s Club Championship champions, Japan’s Urawa Reds.
Urawa automatically qualified for the first group stage as representatives of one of the continent’s eight highest-ranked confederations, along with clubs from North Korea, Australia, China, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan.
The remaining 14 teams will participate in the preliminaries, which will be divided into four groups and will be held from August 25 to 31 in Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Thailand.
The four group winners will join eight other teams in the next stage, where three groups of four teams will play in China, Vietnam and a third venue that has yet to host the tournament. The dates are set to be October 6-13.
The top two teams in each group and the two best third-placed teams will qualify for the quarter-finals, which will be held in March next year, while the semi-finals and final will be held from May 21 to 24.
Teams that participate in the group stage will receive a minimum prize of $100,000, with the value of the prize increasing based on the team’s final ranking.
The winning team will receive $1.3 million, an amount that is larger than the prize money received by the champions of the women’s soccer leagues in Japan, Australia, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.
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