Premier League Asia Trophy
football tournament
The Premier League Asia Trophy (formerly the FA Premier League Asia Cup) was a biennial pre-season association football friendly tournament in Asia. The two-day competition was inaugurated in 2003 and is one of two Premier League-affiliated competitions to be hosted outside England, alongside the Premier League Summer Series in the US. It has taken place every other summer since then in order to avoid conflicting with the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship. For sponsorship purposes, it was referred to as the Barclays Asia Trophy from 2007 until 2015, after which the Premier League discontinued title sponsorship.
The competition features three clubs that are members of the Premier League, as well as a local team from the host country. It employs a knockout system in which the winners of the first matches advance to the final, while the losing teams take part in a third place playoff. The tournament format was partly modified for the 2017 edition, with no local team participating after the withdrawal of Shanghai SIPG. A fourth Premier League club – Crystal Palace – agreed to take their place having avoided relegation and played alongside Liverpool, Leicester City, and West Bromwich Albion. This marked the first time the tournament featured teams solely from the Premier League.
Chelsea won the inaugural tournament in 2003, and finished victorious again in 2011. Seven other sides have won the Premier League Asia Trophy: Bolton Wanderers in 2005, Portsmouth in 2007, Tottenham Hotspur in 2009, Manchester City in 2013, Arsenal in 2015, Liverpool in 2017, and Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2019. Manchester City is the most regular participant, having contested the tournament on three occasions.
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This entry incorporates text from “Premier League Asia Trophy” 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.