The path of the national under-23 football team in the 2026 Asian Cup finals in Saudi Arabia will be clarified the day after tomorrow, Thursday.

This will be through the draw held at 3 PM Malaysia time at the Asian Football Confederation headquarters in Kuala Lumpur.

The draw will distribute the 16 participating teams into four groups in the seventh edition of the tournament, scheduled to start on January 7, 2026.

Saudi Arabia, hosting the tournament for the first time, qualified directly as the host, joined by 15 teams that qualified through the qualifiers which concluded earlier this month.

The national team secured its place in the Asian finals by qualifying with a perfect record in the qualifiers, earning 9 points from 3 wins in Group 1, which included Bhutan, Chinese Taipei, and Turkmenistan.

All five previous champions — Iraq, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan — will be present in the finals, alongside Australia and Jordan, as these seven teams are the only ones to have participated in all editions.

Meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon succeeded in qualifying for the finals for the first time.

As the host country, Saudi Arabia tops the first tier, while the other 15 teams will be distributed into four tiers according to a points system based on their final rankings in the last three editions of the finals.

The tiers are as follows (with rankings in parentheses):

    • Tier 1: Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan (1), Japan (2), Iraq (3).
    • Tier 2: South Korea (5), Vietnam (6), Australia (7), Qatar (8).
    • Tier 3: Thailand (9), Jordan (10), UAE (11), Iran (12).
    • Tier 4: China (13), Syria (14), Kyrgyzstan (15), Lebanon (16).

The top two teams from each group will qualify for the knockout stages, with the final scheduled for January 25, 2026.

The national team continues its preparations for the finals through a domestic camp until October 1, including friendly matches against the UAE on October 10 and 13 in the UAE.

The technical staff, led by coach Omar Najhi, called up a squad of 22 players for this camp: Salama Salman, Abdullah Al-Shaqran, Omar Marar, Adnan Nofal, Mohammed Al-Shatti, Mohammed Haddad, Amer Al-Majdoubah, Suhaib Al-Qadi, Youssef Qashi, Saleh Freij, Mohammed Salah, Ali Al-Ataunah, Moamen Qazaqza, Mohammed Al-Bitar, Saleh Al-Nassirat, Abdullah Tannous, Yazan Al-Awaqleh, Yaman Azayzah, Omar Khudr, Adeeb Ramadan, Abdulrahman Al-Zghaybah, Abdulrahman Jarwan.