AFF Championship

The ASEAN Football Championship (AFF Championship) is a biennial international competition organised by the ASEAN Football Federation (AFF) contested by the national teams of Southeast Asia.

The origins of the competition date back to a meeting in a Bangkok hotel in 1982 when six men from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines gathered on the sidelines of an AFC meeting to discuss the ways to help strengthen regional bonds through football.
From that meeting was born both the ASEAN Football Federation and a regional club competition, the ASEAN Champions' Cup, with the inaugural final seeing 80,000 attend Indonesia's Gelora Bung Karno to watch Bangkok Bank FC defeat local side Yanita Utama.

Both of those club sides are now defunct, as is the tournament which ceased after another three season as interest and funding starting to wane across the region.
The AFF became almost dormant for nearly half a decade and was at risk of becoming irrelevant just as quickly as it had risen to prominence.

In 1994, at the insistence of the Malaysian Football Association, attempts were made to revive the regional body and expand the membership from the original six nations to also include the mainland Southeast Asian nations of Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
In recognising the requirement for the funding that is derived from major tournaments, the previous idea of a club competition was replaced with the inaugural edition of the nation-based AFF Championship in 1996.

With the former Indochina nations still not full AFF members they were invited to the tournament in Singapore to be known as the Tiger Cup.
It was branded as the Tiger Cup after the Singapore-based Asia Pacific Breweries, the makers of Tiger Beer, sponsored the competition from its inauguration in 1996 until the 2004 edition.

After Asia Pacific Breweries withdrew as title sponsors, the competition was known as the AFF Championship for the 2007 edition.

From 2008, Japanese motor company Suzuki bought the naming rights for the competition and was then named the AFF Suzuki Cup for sponsorship reasons.