There are plenty of similarities between the Champions Leagues run by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and Uefa. The two tournaments now follow the same calendar – Asia recently transitioned from a spring start to an autumn one – and the group stage, which kicks off next week, has the same unwieldy format whereby teams play eight opponents once. Also, neither competition involves many Asian nations. Uefa’s version has two – Israel and Kazakhstan – while the AFC’s has 11, with Australia coming in from Oceania to complete the dozen.
However, whatever the problems with Europe’s biggest club tournament, every country is represented and has a theoretical chance of getting to the group stage and, ultimately, all the way to the title. Fifty-three out of the 55 member associations (Russia and Liechtenstein are the absentees) have at least one hopeful. That is true of only 12 of 47 in the AFC Champions League Elite. Three-quarters of Asian countries are either nowhere to be seen or located in the two lower-tier tournaments, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.
