New Concacaf competitions announced
Concacaf has taken another positive step in the region’s ongoing growth and development of women’s football by confirming an expanded calendar of women’s national team competitions for the 2025-2029 international cycle.
The Concacaf Council recently adopted a redesigned women’s national team ecosystem, which would provide a constant calendar of tournaments for all Concacaf federations, giving their women’s national teams regular opportunities to participate on a regional and global scale. The competition forms were created after speaking with key stakeholders and reviewing FIFA’s new women’s international match calendar.
Tournaments will include the W Qualifiers and W Championship, which will serve as a pathway to the FIFA Women’s World Cup and Summer Olympics, as well as the inaugural Concacaf W Nations League and a second edition of the W Gold Cup. Concacaf created the competition forms after speaking with key stakeholders and reviewing FIFA’s new women’s international match calendar.
The 2025-2026 Concacaf W Qualifiers will serve as the preliminary round of the 2026 Concacaf W Championship, with a single round played during the FIFA Women’s International Match Windows of October and November 2025 and February and April 2026. Concacaf Member Associations will be divided into six groups for these qualifiers, which will exclude the region’s two top-ranked nations, according to the Concacaf Women’s Rankings (they will be exempt from the 2026 Concacaf W Championship). Following Group Stage play, in which each club will play a maximum of four games (two at home and two away), the six group winners will advance to the 2026 Concacaf W Championship.
Over in 2026, the Concacaf W Championship, which will be the first of three major centralised competitions announced in the new Concacaf women’s national team calendar, will take place in November 2026 and will serve as the Confederation’s qualifier for the FIFA Women’s World Cup Brazil 2027 and the 2028 LA Summer Olympics. The eight teams competing in the five-round direct elimination knockout style competition will be the region’s two top-ranked teams as well as the six group winners from the 2025-26 Concacaf W Qualifiers.
The competition will start with the quarterfinals, then a play-in, semifinals, third-place match, and final. To determine the quarterfinal pairings and each team’s path to the final, Concacaf will rank teams 1-8, with the highest-ranked team facing the lowest-ranked. At the conclusion of the quarterfinals, the four matchup winners will qualify for the semifinals and guarantee their place in the FIFA Women’s World Cup Brazil 2027, while the four losers will progress to a play-in, where they will face off for Concacaf’s two remaining slots in the Women’s World Cup.
The 2026 Concacaf W Championship Finalists will also compete in the 2028 LA Summer Olympics Games Women’s Football Tournament. If the United States finishes as one of the two W Championship Finalists, Concacaf’s second berth will be awarded to the competition’s third-place finisher, following the precedent of host nations’ automatic qualification for previous editions of the Olympic Football Tournament at the Summer Olympics.
Meanwhile, the first edition of the 2028 Concacaf W Nations League will take place after the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The competition’s group stage will take place in February and April 2028, followed by the finals, where a champion will be crowned in November 2028. The second edition of the Concacaf W Gold Cup will be held in the summer of 2029, featuring the region’s best women’s national teams.
