APL Format Explained: 24 Matches, Playoffs & Points

Start with the part that is solid. The 2026 Afghanistan Premier League has five teams. The season record says they play each other twice, and the top four go into a playoff. Five teams, eight games each, is twenty league matches, because each game would otherwise be counted twice. That arithmetic is not a leak. It is a calendar.

The official site has advertised 24 matches. Twenty plus four is twenty-four. A straight semi-final bracket is only three knockout games: two semis and a final. That was 2018, and 2018 had 23 matches, which is twenty plus three. The extra match in the 2026 marketing number is the clue. Four knockout games is the shape used by leagues that play a qualifier, an eliminator, a second qualifier and a final. The APL site's own words — qualifiers, eliminator, grand final — point the same way.

An August report described something shorter: top of the table into the final, second against third in one eliminator. That would be two knockout games, not four, and it would not need a top four. Later descriptions from the season record moved to a top four. When two official-sounding versions disagree, this site shows the disagreement instead of picking a favourite and calling it law. The format page draws both the 2018 bracket we saw and the 2026 reading that fits 24 games, and it labels the second one as a reading.

Points in 2018 were easy to reverse-engineer from the table. Six wins became 12 points. Two wins became four. That is two points for a win, none for a loss, no tied or no-result game in the league stage. Net run rate split nobody, because no two sides finished level. Whether 2026 copies the two-point win is not in a public playing-conditions PDF that this desk has seen. Until it is, the points table for the new season stays at zero matches, not at imagined points.

Overseas slots, emerging-player quotas and DRS were sketched in early reporting: squads around 16 to 18, a maximum of four overseas players in the XI, at least one local emerging player. The draft itself is built for 18 picks a team, which matches the top of that range. Treat the XI rule as reported, not as a laminated law, until the match referee's sheet exists.

If you want the knockout in pictures, use the diagram on the format page. If you want the only bracket that has already been played, read the 2018 season.