2023–24 National Challenge Cup
football tournament season
The 2023–2024 National Challenge Cup was the 30th edition of domestic football cup competition in Pakistan. The cup competition, which ran from 24 January 2023 until 12 May 2024, featured 27 departmental teams from across the country vying for the title, which was defended by the 2020 champions WAPDA.
Initially scheduled to be held throughout 2023, the second phase was held in May 2024 after almost 15 months of inactivity.
Background
The tournament took place after a gap of nearly three-and-a-half years because of the Pakistan Football Federation's suspension by FIFA due to a power struggle within the Pakistan Football Federation. FIFA lifted the ban imposed on PFF after the legitimate Normalization Committee body was restored.
The tournament was announced briefly after departmental sports in Pakistan were restored in August 2022 by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Many of the departmental clubs were disbanded following the shutdown of departmental sports in Pakistan in September 2021. Departmental teams were then restricted to the National Challenge Cup, following their controversial participation in the Pakistani domestic league setup in the previous years. A PFF official stated that from now on, there will be separate competitions for departments and clubs. When a domestic league is held, it will be solely for clubs.
The PFF Constitution stated that all departmental players need to be “affiliated with a club”, with some teams taking advantage of it such as POPO FC, which had their team playing the Challenge Cup under the department with the name of Mamsons Builders.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q125554111. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2024, 2020 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “2023–24 National Challenge Cup” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.