{"id":17900,"date":"2014-04-18T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=17900"},"modified":"2014-04-18T09:07:51","modified_gmt":"2014-04-18T16:07:51","slug":"asian-cup-to-be-expanded-to-24-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2014\/04\/18\/asian-cup-to-be-expanded-to-24-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"Asian Cup to be expanded to 24 teams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>FIFA &#8211; TEHRAN, <strong>Asian football&#8217;s governing body has announced an expansion of the flagship AFC Asian Cup from 16 to 24 teams but killed off the lower-level Challenge Cup as part of a regional shake-up.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The 2019 Asian Cup will climb to 24 teams but next month&#8217;s Challenge Cup in the Maldives will be the last, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) said.<\/p>\n<p>Preliminary qualifying for the Asian Cup and FIFA World Cup\u2122 will also be combined, the body said following an executive committee meeting.<\/p>\n<p>Teams will be divided among eight groups with the pool winners and four best-placed second sides reaching both the Asian Cup and the final World Cup qualifiers.<\/p>\n<p>The next 24 best teams will be split into six groups of four to battle it out for the remaining Asian Cup spots, the AFC said in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FIFA &#8211; TEHRAN, Asian football&#8217;s governing body has announced an expansion of the flagship AFC&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25049,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news"],"views":5348,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25049"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17900\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}