KLUpod Final Round: AFC Champions League 2026-27 Preview

Um, I'm for more teams in general.

Uh, it seems a bit sacrilege though that I am not 100% behind having more K League teams, and that also extends to having more J League teams, more teams from Saudi Arabia.

I think if you're gonna open the slots up, you wanna kind of open it to more regions, um, because, well, as we're gonna get into the fixtures in a minute, we've got five J League teams [laughs] in this, uh, five Saudi teams in this, and all deservedly qualified under the criteria, but it's just, uh, variety is the spice of life and I feel that the, over the, well, you said 2019 there, but I feel like, yeah, over the last, I guess, five, six years, this, this competition has become, uh, less appealing year by year.

Yeah.

Um, I agree with what you're saying because I was obviously looking more in depth at, uh, some fixtures for Daejeon, obviously, which we'll get, get to later.

But five of obviously, uh, eight matches are against J League teams and-

Mm-hmm

... um, you just, you just, you think, well, should there be this many? Um, the, the teams that you want to face more of are the sort of Southeast Asian teams because of the sort of the atmospheres are gonna be good.

Mm-hmm.

That said, they are away to JDT, which will be very, very hard.

But yeah, you want, if you want...

We, we already know that Japan and Korea are strong leagues in the region.

Um, Saudi too in the West.

So do we really need to know, do we need more of those teams in, in this league? Do we not need more from, say, Vietnam or from Thailand or from, from other nations in, in throughout the region?

Well, yeah, because the clue's in the title.

It's the, [laughs] the Asian Champions League, and, uh, Asia is more than a handful of countries.

I know it's a bit easy to say from the pedestal of K League that's always had a reasonable contingent, it should be said.

So I mean, uh, you know, maybe it was too high before then as well.

People might be saying K League's al- always had four Yeah, but it just seems like we've lost something now that we're getting into...

Well, you know, there's been other changes year on year that we've mentioned.

We can kind of go into them, I guess, in a minute, but it just feels like it's, it's leaning too much towards certain leagues and not really benefiting the greater region.

It feels like a name change is probably will be better fitted, like the Asian Club Cup or Club Championship or something along those lines, because the Champions League, as it is in Europe, of course, doesn't really fully reflect the, what the, you know, the teams that are involved in, in these competitions.

Mm-hmm.

So yeah, 32 teams.

But what, what it does mean is, um, that K League teams will play against some, not all, but some different teams from each other.