The Asian Cricket Council (ACC) Premier League is a List A tournament played in the One Day International and T20 International format alternatively each edition. This tournament serves as a qualification pathway for the Asia Cup. The ACC Premier league began in 2014 as a continuation of the previously held ACC Trophy. However, it was discontinued after the first edition. The tournament was reintroduced in 2023.
The ACC Premier League is played only between the Associate Members of the Asian Cricket Council. This means that the tournament does not feature full-member nations of the Asian Cricket Council (India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan).
Before the ACC Premier League was introduced, the qualification path for the associate members to get to the Asia Cup was scattered through divisional tournaments. To overcome this, the Asia Cup Premier League was introduced.The new format saw the entire event be broadly divided as two events. Ten associate members would first compete in a Challenger Cup featuring the lower-ranked associate members. It features a group stage, followed by a knockout stage. The finalists of this event qualify for the ACC Premier League.
The ACC Premier League features the top eight associate members of the Asian Cricket Council and the finalists of the ACC Challenger Cup. Even in its previous editions and the reinvented structure, the format of the tournament has varied owing to the scheduling of the events in international cricket, availability, and participation of teams.
As of 2024, the ACC Premier League has a group stage and a knockout stage. The group stage sees the ten teams divided into two groups of five teams each. Each team plays the other team of its group in a round-robin format. A win is worth two points, a match with no result leads to both teams getting a point each, and no points are awarded for a loss. At the end of the group stage, the top two teams of each group qualify for the knockout stage. The winner of the event qualifies for the next year’s Asia Cup.
In its two editions held thus far, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates have won the ACC Premier League once each.
