AFC
Kuala Lumpur
The Asian club game will mark another pivotal milestone when the cast for the groundbreaking AFC Champions League Elite (ACL Elite) 2024/25 season assembles for the official League Stage draw ceremony on Friday, August 16, at 5pm.
To be held at the InterContinental Kuala Lumpur, the event will reveal highly anticipated battles between Asia’s best 24 clubs for the maiden edition of the revamped men’s Continental club competition.
A pivotal change in the ACL Elite, the League Stage format will be utilised for the first time in an AFC club competition and features two leagues of 12 teams across 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 line-up – comprising 22 teams that qualified directly and two Preliminary Stage winners – will be placed into two pots within each region.
For each region, every club will be drawn into their respective position in the Draw Grid – in the example depicted above, which applies to the West region, Pot 1 clubs occupy any of the top two rows (A1 to C2) and Pot 2 clubs the bottom two (A3 to C4), which ensures they play against eight different sides from the other columns (e.g. clubs in column A will be paired against clubs from columns B and C). The Pairings Grid ensures that each team plays four home and four away matches against an equal number of clubs from Pots 1 and 2. An identical process applies to clubs in the East region, which will be classified from D1 to D4, E1 to E4 and F1 to F4.
The country protection principle will be in force and a bespoke draw software will be utilised to prevent any deadlock situations from occurring.
The top eight finishers of each League progress to the Round of 16, scheduled for March 2025, which will be followed by a unique centralised Finals that sees all matches from the Quarter-finals onwards being contested in Saudi Arabia between April 25 and May 4, 2025.