The CAF Champions League

The competition is open to clubs from across the Confederation of African Football's 54 member associations. Member associations normally send one or two clubs, based on domestic league finishing positions and CAF's association ranking. The highest-ranked associations receive two places, while the remaining associations usually receive one.

The competition has been held every year since 1964, originally as the African Cup of Champions Clubs and as the CAF Champions League since 1997. Al Ahly of Egypt is by far the most successful club, with twelve titles. Egyptian clubs collectively have won the competition more often than clubs from any other country.

The competition begins with preliminary qualifying rounds, played as two-legged knockout ties. Sixteen clubs progress from qualifying to the group stage. The group stage features four groups of four clubs, with each team playing the other three home and away. The top two from each group go through to the quarter-finals.

From the quarter-finals onwards, ties are played over two legs — one match at each club's home ground. The team with more goals on aggregate progresses. If the aggregate score is level, the away goals rule is used; if away goals are also level, the tie is decided by penalties. The final is also played over two legs in the current format, with the order of legs set by CAF's draw and fixture schedule.

In recent seasons, the competition has usually begun in August or September and ended with the final in May or June. This means most editions cross the calendar year, with the qualifying rounds and group stage in the first part of the season and the knockout rounds in the following year.

CAF sets the calendar around domestic schedules, international windows and other CAF or FIFA competitions. Matchdays can vary by round. Preliminary ties may be played on weekends or selected midweek dates, while later-round matches are often scheduled for Fridays, Saturdays or Tuesdays.

CAF uses a five-year ranking that measures how each member association's clubs have performed in CAF competitions. The top twelve associations in the ranking receive two places each, normally for the national champion and the national league runner-up. The remaining CAF members usually receive one place, awarded to the national champion.

The list of two-place associations changes as the ranking changes. Recent two-place associations have included Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, South Africa and other leagues with strong CAF club results. For 2024/25, CAF's top twelve also included Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, Nigeria, DR Congo, Sudan and Tanzania.

The CAF Champions League winner qualifies automatically for the FIFA Intercontinental Cup. The exact early-round route depends on FIFA's annual format, but the African champion enters the African-Asian-Pacific section of the competition alongside champions from Asia and Oceania. Winning the CAF Champions League is also one of the main routes into the FIFA Club World Cup cycle.

Within CAF itself, the Champions League winner plays the CAF Confederation Cup winner — Africa's second-tier club competition — in the CAF Super Cup, an annual one-off match that decides Africa's super cup.

The competition was launched in 1964 as the African Cup of Champions Clubs, a small knockout competition for the national champions of CAF's member countries. Oryx Douala of Cameroon won the first edition. The early decades saw a wider spread of winners, including clubs from across sub-Saharan Africa, before North African clubs — particularly Egyptian, Moroccan and Tunisian sides — became increasingly prominent from the 1980s onwards. Mamelodi Sundowns' 2025-26 win showed that South African clubs remain part of the modern title picture.

The competition was rebranded as the CAF Champions League in 1997, with a new format that introduced a group stage in place of the early-round knockouts that had defined the older African Cup of Champions Clubs. The format has been adjusted several times since, but the basic structure — qualifying rounds, a group stage, two-legged knockout rounds and, in the current format, a two-legged final — remains central to the competition.

The CAF Women's Champions League launched in 2021 as the equivalent women's club competition for African football. It uses zonal qualifying to reduce the field to an eight-club final tournament. Its winner is part of FIFA's new women's global club pathway, including the FIFA Women's Champions Cup from 2026 and the FIFA Women's Club World Cup from 2028.

CAF has also run under-17 girls' club development tournaments, such as the CAF Under-17 Girls Integrated Football Tournament, but these are separate youth development events rather than a direct junior version of the men's CAF Champions League.