President Issa Hayatou announced this as the 38th Caf ordinary general assembly staged in Mexico City.
Both competitions will now have 16 teams at the group stage – and this takes effect from 2017.After the preliminary round, 32 teams will book a place for the Round of 16 in both competitions. The winners of this round will after drawing of lots, be placed into four groups of four teams each.
After a round-robin of matches (home and away), the first two of each group will qualify for the quarter-finals, which opens a new phase of knockout matches till the final. Clubs finishing top of each group will host the second leg of the quarterfinals.
With this, Caf now has 20 calendar dates for club competitions that will go from March to November for the Caf Champions League and until December for the Caf Confederation Cup.
Previous changes made by CAF are: apart from the introduction of the away goals rule (in which the team wins which has scored more goals playing ‘away’ if there is a tie in the aggregate score line over the two legs), very little changed in this competition until 1997. In this year, CAF took the bold step to follow the lead established a few years earlier in UEFA (in 1993) by creating a league stage in the tournament and changing the name to the CAF Champions League. CAF also introduced prize money for participants for the first time. With a purse of US$1 million on offer to the winners and US$750,000 to the losing finalist, the new Champions League had become the second richest club competition in Africa after the ABSA Premiership worth $2 million.
In the current format about to be rested, the league champions of the
respective CAF member countries went through a series of preliminary
rounds until a last 16 stage. The 8 winners of this round were then
drawn into two mini-leagues of 4 teams each, with each team playing each
other on a home and away basis. At the end of the league stage, the top
two teams in each group meet in the semifinals, with the winners going
through to contest the finals.As regards the monetary prize of the CAF Champions League: from the 2009 season, the winners' purse was increased to US$1.5 million and the runners up to US$1 million which still makes the CAF Champions League the second richest behind the ABSA Premiership.
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