AFCON and the Asian Cup both have playoffs on the schedule. How do the eight-final pairs of both championships look like?

While the season of the leading league competitions in Europe is in full swing, the fans of national football on the other two continents will now have their turn. Both the AFCON and Asian Cup will offer a knockout phase after the group stage. Which teams will face each other in the eight-final battles and what is their schedule?

Africa Cup of Nations

The Africa Cup of Nations, also known by the acronym AFCON, is hosted by Ivory Coast this year. The home team did not fare as well as expected at the 34th edition of the championship, but still managed to advance in the end. However, the team of two-time champions will have a new coaching staff in the future as the leadership of the Côte d’Ivoire Football Federation has already announced the dismissal of French head coach Jean-Louis Gasset and his assistant Ghislain Printant.

Some of the favoured teams have dropped out before the play-off gates. Surprisingly, the representatives of Algeria, for example, who celebrated their second triumph at the AFCON relatively recently, in 2019, will not continue in the tournament. The successors of the four-time champions from Ghana or the Tunisians, whose predecessors ruled twenty years ago, also failed to qualify.

The section for the more successful participants in this year’s African Championship will open with Angola’s duel with Namibia at 6pm on Saturday. At 9pm, the teams that have been a traditional part of the event held since 1957 will go up against each other. Five-time winners Cameroon will challenge three-time winners Nigeria.

The following days’ contests will also start at the same listed times. On Sunday, the tournament’s current top scorer, Emilio Nsue of Equatorial Guinea, will take to the pitch with five goals to face his (almost) namesake Guinea.

With seven golds, the historically most successful African Cup nation has not enjoyed as much joy this time around. Egypt’s footballers have only drawn three times in the group stage, plus their star Mohamed Salah has been injured. Without his help, they will try to beat the Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday night.

One of the biggest surprises in the list of qualifiers is Cape Verde, who will face the also not fully expected eight-finalists Mauritania on Monday. After that, the defending champions from Senegal will take the stage, with the aforementioned Elephants of Ivory Coast as their opponents.

On Tuesday, Mali and Burkina Faso will face off, with silverware being the biggest achievement of the AFCON past. The eight-final event will end with the clash of the national teams of the countries that have already won the precious trophy. Morocco celebrated in 1976, South Africa two decades later.

Asian Cup

This is the 18th edition of the Asian Cup. For the third time, the venue is Qatar, home of the last World Cup. The Asian football Championship was first held there in 1988 and the second time in 2011.

The eight-final stage in this case will kick off on Sunday. The game times there are 2:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. In CET, that means opening kicks at 12.30pm and 5pm.

Sunday’s programme will open with a match between Indonesia and Australia, which has been participating in the Asian summit instead of the Oceania championship since 2007. The counterparts, incidentally, triumphed on home soil eight years later, making them the only team to win both these championships.

Tajikistan went straight to the eighth round on their debut at the final Asia Cup tournament. There, they will be looking to catch the United Arab Emirates, whose best finish to date is silver in 1996.

Monday’s Asian Championships will belong to representatives of the Arab world. The Iraqi national team, champions seventeen years ago, will play Jordan. The Qataris, defending gold, will then take on Palestine at home, who have reached the play-offs for the first time.

The first match on Tuesday will offer a confrontation between the eight-time participants in the championship, namely Uzbekistan and Thailand. The duel between Saudi Arabia and South Korea, regular ambassadors of Asia at the World Cup in recent decades, promises to be interesting. The Arabs have been continental champions three times, the Koreans twice.

Wednesday’s opening clash has a clear favourite in the Japanese. The representatives of the land of the rising sun, with four triumphs the most successful in history, will face Bahrain. The quarter-final battles will be rounded off in the evening by a match between the Iranians, whose countrymen have reigned over Asian football for three seasons in the past, and the Syrians. For Syria, this will be their first ever appearance in the knockout stage.

Source: CAF, AFC