Egyptian Premier League 2026-27 fixtures draw set for 5 August as clubs learn new format

The Egyptian Professional Clubs Association has confirmed that the draw for the 2026-2027 Egyptian Premier League season will take place on Wednesday, 5 August, with the competition set to kick off later that month under a revised format.

The draw will be staged at the Goal Project headquarters in Sheikh Zayed, starting at 15:00 local time in Cairo. All 20 participating clubs will discover their schedules for a campaign that is due to begin on 21 August.

Zamalek enter the new season as defending champions, having won the most recent edition of the league.

New league structure confirmed

The Egyptian Premier League will again feature 20 teams in 2026-2027, but the competition will be played using a format that divides the campaign into two distinct phases.

The season will start with a single round-robin stage, in which each team faces every other club once. At the end of that phase, the top six sides in the table will move into a championship group to compete for the league title.

The remaining clubs will be placed into a separate group focused on avoiding relegation. That second group will determine which teams drop to the second tier at the end of the season.

Four clubs will be relegated to the second division, while only three teams will be promoted in the opposite direction. As a result, the top flight will be reduced to 19 clubs for the 2027-2028 season.

The association has not announced any further changes to the competition format beyond the confirmed structure for next season and the knock-on effect on the number of participating teams in 2027-2028.

Diab re-elected unopposed

Away from the fixture planning, the governance of the league has also been settled for a new term.

The Egyptian Professional Clubs Association has re-elected Ahmed Diab as its chairman by acclamation, meaning he will continue in his position as head of the association’s board.

Elections for the association were held and the new board line-up was approved without contest. Diab remains as chairman of the board of directors, supported by a largely unchanged group of members.

The board includes Ibrahim El-Kafrawy, Khaled Refaat and Khaled Shokry, with one alteration to the previous line-up. Mohamed El-Khouly has joined the board, replacing Sherif Saleh as the only change in the membership.

The Egyptian Football Association is expected to complete the governance picture next week. It will name two of its own nominees to sit on the board of the Professional Clubs Association, with those appointments still to be confirmed.

With the leadership settled and the draw date fixed, attention will now turn to 5 August in Sheikh Zayed, when the roadmap for the 2026-2027 Egyptian Premier League season will be formally unveiled.