The
Union of Arab Football Associations (UAFA) decided to create a competition for champions of Arab countries after the end of the 1979–80 season. Domestic champions from UAFA's member nations were invited to compete, but after several withdrawals, only three teams from
Iraq,
Lebanon and
Jordan ended up participating.
The competition kicked off on 19 June 1981 with Lebanese champions
Nejmeh beating Jordanian champions
Al-Ahli 2–1. Nejmeh's Jamal Al-Khatib was the scorer of the first Arab Club Champions Cup goal. Nejmeh and Al-Shorta competed in the inaugural final in February 1982, with Al-Shorta winning 4–2 on aggregate at
Al-Shaab Stadium in
Baghdad to be crowned the first champions of the
Arab world. The tournament was not held the following year but returned in
1984 in a
round-robin format, and
Al-Ettifaq earned the first title for a
Saudi Arabian club that year. With the number of participants increasing every year, UAFA introduced preliminary qualifying rounds that preceded the final round-robin tournament, before they changed the format of the final tournament in
1987 to one that consisted of a group stage followed by a knockout stage. UAFA also started to allow countries to have more than one participant in 1987, with two Saudi Arabian clubs (
Al-Ittihad and
Al-Hilal) and two Iraqi clubs (
Al-Rasheed and
Al-Jaish) competing. Al-Rasheed of Iraq dominated the competition during these years, becoming the first team to win three consecutive championships in
1985,
1986 and
1987, while Al-Ettifaq won their title back in
1988. From 1981 to 1988, no team from the
Confederation of African Football (CAF) was able to win the tournament and all winners were from the
Asian Football Confederation (AFC). An African club became champions of the Arab world for the first time in
1989 as
Wydad Casablanca of
Morocco beat
Saudi Arabia's
Al-Hilal in the final. That same year, UAFA founded a new annual competition that would be held alongside the Arab Club Champions Cup; it was called the
Arab Cup Winners' Cup and was a competition for the cup winners of Arab countries, with a similar format to that of the Champions Cup. In
1995, UAFA introduced the
Arab Super Cup which was an annual round-robin competition between the winners and runners-up of both the Champions Cup and Cup Winners' Cup. From 1989 until 2001, there were six winners from CAF and five from the AFC. Four of the eleven winners during this time were from Saudi Arabia, while
Espérance de Tunis earned the first win for a
Tunisian team in
1993,
Al-Ahly became the first
Egyptian champions in
1995,
WA Tlemcen earned
Algeria's first title in
1998 and
Al-Sadd won the first title for a
Qatari club in
2001. In
2002, UAFA made a decision that changed the face of Arab club football. After the 2003 edition,
ART became the tournament's sponsor and UAFA then changed the name of the tournament to the Arab Champions League so that its name was similar to other elite club tournaments such as the
UEFA Champions League,
CAF Champions League,
AFC Champions League and
OFC Champions League. From the
2004–05 edition onwards, UAFA reintroduced two-legged finals, which had not been used since the first edition of the tournament. However, UAFA then ran into the same problems as before which led to another four-year hiatus. Espérance de Tunis were crowned champions making them the joint-most successful team in the competition's history. The
2023 edition of the tournament was widely covered by international media due to the participation of a number of high-profile players such as
Cristiano Ronaldo,
Karim Benzema and
N'Golo Kanté following their transfers to
Saudi Pro League clubs. Out of the thirteen champions crowned from 2002 to 2023, ten of them were from Africa and only three were from Asia. ==Branding==