2025–26 Indian Football League
football league season
The 2025–26 Indian Football League (previously the I-League), also known as the Star Cement Indian Football League (due to sponsorship reasons with Star Cement), was the fourth season of the Indian Football League as the second tier of the Indian football league system, which started on February 27, 2026. Inter Kashi were the reigning champions, having won the 2024–25 I-League.
Developments
After the Indian Super League received no bids for a sponsor, the I-League was left without a commercial partner too, putting the future of the league in doubt.
On 15 February 2026, the AIFF announced that the rebranded 2025–26 Indian Football League season will feature a two-stage format. Stage 1 will see the 10 participating clubs compete in a single-leg home-and-away round-robin format. In Stage 2, the teams get divided into two groups. Those that finished in the top half in Stage 1 will advance to a home-and-away championship round, while the bottom half will compete in a centralised relegation round. All points from Stage 1 will be carried forward to Stage 2. The league toppers at the end of Stage 2 will be crowned the Indian Football League champions and will be promoted to the 2026–27 Indian Super League.
On 8th April 2026, the AIFF informed all clubs that going forward all matches would be played in the evenings under lights to increase primetime viewership.
The public source identifies “2025–26 Indian Football League” as football league season. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Indian, Football and League.
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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 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q134238596. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2026 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “2025–26 Indian Football League” 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.