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Thursday | November 05, 2026 | Dhaka

SAFF Championship 2026 kicks-off today

 Sabbir Hossain
 Published: 12:02 AM, 05 November 2026

The South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) Championship will kick-off today at the National Stadium in Dhaka.

SAFF Championship, the gala extravaganza of this region, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is called the World Cup of SAARC. SAFF will arrange the SAFF Championship 2026 under auspices of Tecno Mobile Phone Company.

The Bangladesh Football Federation will give all sorts of cooperation to run the mega event smoothly. A total of six teams dividing into two groups will take part in the first phase of the SAFF Championship 2026.

Hosts Bangladesh, Bhutan Sri Lanka are in Group-A, while India, Pakistan, Maldives are in Group-B. Nepal could not take part in the SAFF Championship 2026 as they have been banned by FIFA, the highest governing body of world football.

India will take on Pakistan in the inaugural match, which will start today at 3:30pm (Bangladesh Standard Time), while Bangladesh will meet Bhutan in the day’s second match, which will begin at 8:00pm (Bangladesh Standard Time).

Private satellite sports channel T Sports will telecast all the matches live from the mach-venue. Before today’s match, Bangladesh and Bhutan faced each other in 13 matches.

Bangladesh registered nine victories, while Bhutan posted to wins and rest of the two occasion ended in draws.
Bangladesh hosted the SAFF Championship 20o3 and the became the champions.

It is the maiden maximum success for Bangladesh in SAFF Championship. After 23 years, Bangladesh have a golden chance to clinch the title of SAFF Championship.

It may be mentioned that Bangladesh took part in the FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026 recently. But Bangladesh failed to show a satisfactory performance in that tournament.

Bangladesh for the first time competed in a FIFA tournament. Earlier, Bangladesh took part in the FIFA Qualifiers. The red-and-green outfit performed well in FIFA Qualifiers 2026.

marking the upcoming tournament, The SAFF organising committee arranged a press conference at Sheraton Hotel in the capital’s Banani on Wednesday.

Head Coach of Bangladesh team Thomas Dooley and Captain of Bangladesh team Topu Barman spoke at the press conference. Thomas Dooley said, ” The participating teams of FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026 were stronger than Bangladesh.

Those teams had quality players and they had stronger expatriate booters. Specially, Indonesia and Malaysia had better brand of footballers and also they performed a formidable performance. Thus, Bangladesh failed to show a satisfactory performance.”

Thomas Dooley hopes Bangladesh team will come out from that nightmare and his boys will show up to the mark performance and will earn a good result in this tournament.