Hardcore soccer fans need no introduction to how the sport’s most successful teams often find themselves simultaneously competing in multiple stand-alone pursuits of trophies and tournament titles in the same season.
Outside of The Beautiful Game, it’s an unfamiliar concept in North America—although the NBA is changing that slightly with three years of the NBA Cup—where pro sports have a purely linear schedule: a regular season, followed by playoffs.
But independent competitions have been commonplace elsewhere in the soccer universe for over a century. Teams will compete for a regular-season championship trophy, and in many places, like Mexico, there are two regular seasons within a year; they’ll chase the playoff-title trophy; will challenge all the other pro and semi-pro teams in a democratic national championship which has to be wedged into the same months as their league play; and the ones who qualify will also compete in Champions Cup against the surviving teams from their FIFA (soccer’s global governing body) geographical region. On some continents, like Europe, there are even more tournaments running at the same time.
“It’s about hardware,” explains one Forge insider. “Trophies mean a lot in this sport.”
Just reaching Champions Cup play is an accomplishment. Although they fell short of the Canadian Premier League finals for the first time in their seven-year history, by then Forge had already earned an automatic Cup berth when they clinched the 2025 CPL regular-season championship signified by their second straight CPL Shield in mid-October.
It’s the hardest, longest route into Champions Cup—the Canadian Championship and CPL playoffs, the other possible pathways, require fewer games and wins—but Forge’s record-setting 2025 campaign propelled them into their series against Mexican giant Los Tigres of Monterrey.
Concacaf—the acronym for The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football—is one of FIFA’s six continental governing bodies for “association football,” a.k.a. organized soccer. It has 41 members, including three—Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana—which are technically in South America.
Concacaf Champions Cup comprises five elimination rounds, beginning right after the New Year and ending with a one-game final in late May. The first four rounds are traditional home-and-away series, with the team ranked higher in world points usually earning the right to play the second game at home.
Three of the four Canadian representatives in the Cup are from the CPL: Forge, CPL champions Ottawa Atlético and surprise national championship finalists Vancouver FC. The latter two qualified for the first time. Vancouver Whitecaps, who eliminated Forge in the Canadian Championship semifinal on their way to the national title, is the sole Canadian team from the MLS. They reached the final of last year’s Concacaf Champions Cup but were beaten 5-0 by Mexico’s Cruz Azul.
The winner of Concacaf’s Cup then advances to soccer’s world club championships—known every fourth year, starting in 2025, as the Club World Cup and as the Intercontinental Cup in all other years—and will play against the winners from FIFA’s other five regions. The last six club world champions were teams even casual fans are familiar with: Paris Saint-Germain in penalty kicks six weeks ago over Brazil’s Flamengo, preceded in the previous five years by Manchester City, Real Madrid, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and Liverpool. Pretty elite company.
Of the 27 Concacaf teams who have qualified for this year’s Champions Cup, five have a bye into the second round, and the other 22 play an opening round in one of three “windows” which begins with the first window that includes Los Tigres at Forge.
The tournament provides all teams with a benchmark of how they compare on the regional and world scene. It also has plenty of financial incentives for teams which reach the Cup stage, the payouts increasing with each round and the winning club standing to earn $5 million.
And for clubs like Forge, constant international attention—in Champions Cup and Concacaf League before that—has helped attract both domestic free agents and international players who are looking for championships, and the kind of exposure on a larger world stage which can result in transferring to a higher-level, higher-paying league.