The 2022/23 Nigerian Professional Football League champions, Enyimba have been shortlisted with other eight African teams that will participate in the inaugural edition of the African Football League (AFL) by the Confederation of African Football (CAF).
The AFL is a brainchild of CAF and FIFA that will feature a selected group of teams from three different African Regional Blocks; the North, the Central-West and the South-East Regions.
The list comprising the Egyptian powerhouse Al Ahly Cairo, Tunisia’s Espérance Sportive de Tunis and Wydad Athletic Club from Morocco were selected clubs from the North Region, Nigeria’s Enyimba and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Tout Puissant Mazembe as representatives of the Central-West Region, and South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns, Angola’s Atlético Petróleos de Luanda and Tanzania’s Simba Sports Club make up the South-East Region.
The draw for the Inaugural AFL competition will be held in Cairo, Egypt, on 2 September 2023, and will be streamed live on the AFL website and televised by CAF’s broadcast partners, meanwhile, the fixtures of the competition are structured on a home and away basis, with the knock-out quarter-finals, the semi-finals and the final; all of which will be played over two legs.
This historic edition of the AFL will span for four weeks, kicking off with the Opening Ceremony and the first match in Dar es Salam, Tanzania on 20 October 2023.
The semi-finals are expected to take place between 29 October and 1 November, while the final matches to determine the winner of the tournament are slated between 5 and 11 November 2023.
However, the newly-introduced competition will subsequently feature 24 highest-ranked African football clubs in the next edition and will commence during the 2024/25 football season.