Sixty-two clubs enter. Sixteen make the group stage. One lifts the trophy in May with a cheque for six million dollars attached to it. The CAF Champions League is the prize every serious club on the continent is built around, and understanding how a team actually gets from a preliminary round in September to a final eight months later explains a lot about why African club football looks the way it does.
Key Takeaways
- The CAF Champions League is Africa’s top club competition, run by the Confederation of African Football since 1964.
- Sixty-two clubs entered the 2025-26 preliminary rounds, with the field narrowing to 16 for a group stage of four groups of four.
- The top two teams from each group advance to two-legged knockout rounds, ending in a final in May.
- The 2026-27 champions will collect USD 6 million, with the runner-up and each knockout stage also carrying its own prize payout.
- Al Ahly of Egypt are the competition’s most successful club by a wide margin, with 12 titles.
How Teams Qualify for the Group Stage
Getting into the CAF Champions League group stage is a long process even before the tournament most fans think of actually starts. The 2025-26 season alone featured a record 62 clubs entering the preliminary rounds, drawn from domestic league champions and, in some cases, runners-up across CAF’s member federations.
Clubs eliminated in the first two preliminary rounds are not sent home empty-handed. CAF pays out USD 100,000 to each side knocked out at that early stage, a financial support measure that has become a meaningful piece of income for smaller federations whose clubs rarely go deep in continental competition.
By the time the preliminary rounds are done, the field has narrowed to the 16 clubs that make up the group stage proper.
The Group Stage Format
Those 16 teams are split into four groups of four, playing a full home-and-away round robin, six matches per club. The top two finishers in each group advance, while third and fourth-placed sides are eliminated outright, with no parachute into the Confederation Cup at this stage.
For clubs that fall short of Champions League qualification altogether or exit in the preliminary rounds, CAF’s second-tier club competition offers a different route to continental silverware. Our explainer on how the CAF Confederation Cup works covers that competition’s own format and how the two are linked.
From Quarter-Finals to the Final
Once eight teams remain, the competition switches to two-legged knockout ties: quarter-finals, semi-finals, and a two-legged final that decides the champion. The 2026-27 season’s calendar gives a good sense of how long this stretch actually takes:
| Stage | Dates |
|---|---|
| Preliminary Round 1 | 4-13 September 2026 |
| Preliminary Round 2 | 16-25 October 2026 |
| Group Stage, Matchdays 1-6 | 27 November 2026 to 24 January 2027 |
| Quarter-Finals | 26 February to 7 March 2027 |
| Semi-Finals | 9-18 April 2027 |
| Final | 9-31 May 2027 |
That is roughly eight months from the first preliminary round tie to a champion being crowned, longer than most European domestic seasons, and a genuine test of squad depth for clubs also competing in their own league and cup competitions throughout.
What Winning Is Actually Worth
Prize money has climbed steadily as CAF has worked to make its flagship club competition more financially competitive with what clubs can earn domestically or through transfer sales. For the 2026-27 season, the champion collects USD 6 million, up from the 2025-26 season’s USD 4 million payout, with the runner-up and each knockout round carrying its own smaller allocation on top.
That jump matters more in African club football than the raw figure might suggest elsewhere. For many clubs, a single deep Champions League run can outweigh an entire season’s domestic league revenue, which is part of why qualification itself, not just winning the thing outright, is treated as a genuine financial event by club boards across the continent.
Al Ahly’s Record, and Who Is Chasing It
No club has come close to Al Ahly’s dominance of this competition. The Cairo giants have won the CAF Champions League 12 times, a record that puts serious daylight between them and every other club in the competition’s history. It is the kind of number that makes Al Ahly the natural reference point any time a club talks about building a continental dynasty.
The most recent champions, Pyramids FC, also of Egypt, show that Egyptian football’s grip on the trophy extends well beyond Al Ahly alone. Between Al Ahly’s historical dominance and the strength of the Egyptian Premier League more broadly, North African clubs have generally held the upper hand over the competition’s history, though sides from West and Southern Africa’s other footballing powers have broken through often enough to keep the tournament from feeling predetermined.
Following the 2026-27 Season
With preliminary rounds already under way as of this writing and the group stage set to run through the turn of the year, the 2026-27 CAF Champions League overlaps directly with a stacked continental calendar that also includes AFCON 2027 qualifying and several CAF youth tournaments. Our full 2027 African football calendar lays out how all of it fits together across the year.
Once the group stage draw is locked in and fixtures are confirmed, TuSportNews will be covering match predictions for the CAF Champions League’s biggest ties, alongside the rest of our African football coverage. Until then, keep an eye on how the preliminary rounds shake out, since that is where several ambitious clubs will already be out of the running before the tournament most fans recognise even begins.