CAF Champions League Fixtures 2026-27: Second Preliminary Round Dates, Venues and the Pirates and Sundowns Ties

The CAF Champions League second preliminary round is played over two weekends: first legs on 16, 17 and 18 October 2026 and return legs on 23, 24 and 25 October. Sixteen ties decide who reaches the group stage, which CAF says begins at the end of November. Orlando Pirates open away to African Stars of Namibia at the Botswana National Stadium in Gaborone on Saturday 17 October. Holders Mamelodi Sundowns open away to Wiliete in Lubango, Angola, on Sunday 18 October, then host the return at Loftus Versfeld. Every tie below matches CAF’s official draw, and every date and venue is from the ESPN fixture feed read this morning.

Second preliminary round: first legs

The ties are CAF’s own list, published on cafonline.com on 15 September 2026. Dates and venues are from the ESPN CAF Champions League scoreboard, read one date at a time on 8 October 2026. CAF’s article gives only the two match windows, so where we found an independent source for a specific date we say so in the next section. We have deliberately left out kick-off times: CAF has not published them, and for the Pirates game the two sources we checked disagree by four hours.

Second preliminary round: return legs

The winner of each tie on aggregate goes into the group-stage draw. ESPN lists fifteen of the sixteen return legs. Young Africans v CFFA is not on the feed for any date from 22 to 26 October, so its date stays open until it is listed.

What two sources agree on, and where they do not

This is the part most fixture pages skip. Before publishing, we checked every South African date against a second, independent report, and we list the disagreements instead of hiding them.

We will update this page when CAF confirms kick-off times and when the Pirates return date is settled. If you are planning to travel, check the club’s own channels before you book.

Four games in fourteen days for Pirates and Sundowns

This schedule is our own reading of verified dates, and it is the angle that matters most for anyone following the two South African clubs. Both play the MTN8 final against each other on Saturday 10 October at Moses Mabhida Stadium (18:00, confirmed by Briefly and africasoccer), then a Betway Premiership game on Tuesday 13 October (19:30 SAST, on both SuperSport and the ESPN feed), then the first leg abroad, then the return.

Days rest counts the full days between matches. Sundowns have the tighter run because their first leg is a day later than Pirates’ and both return legs are listed on the same Friday. Sundowns also travel further, to Lubango in southern Angola, while Pirates cross only one border. African Stars chose Gaborone because, according to SportyTrader, they do not have a CAF-approved stadium in Namibia, so Pirates’ away leg is on neutral ground in Botswana rather than in Namibia.

Home legs played away from home

Reading the venues ESPN lists against each club’s country, four of the 32 legs in this round are home games played outside the home club’s country:

The CFFA case is the most unusual: their home first leg against Young Africans is listed at a stadium in Tanzania, Young Africans’ own country. A home leg on the opponent’s soil removes most of what home advantage is worth, which is why a neutral or borrowed venue is something to check before reading too much into a first-leg score.

Where Pirates and Sundowns stand in our graded record

We publish every graded pick, losses included. Read live from our homepage on 8 October 2026, the site’s record is 109 wins and 78 losses, 58 percent over 187 graded picks, and our Strong band (70 percent and above) has won 25 of 30. Within that record:

The honest reading is that we have very little evidence on African club football at continental level, and our domestic South African record is below 50 percent, with most losses coming from draws. That is why the only CAF Champions League picks we have published for this round are the two Sundowns legs below. They first appeared on our Sundowns pages on 3 October and are repeated here unchanged, because we never revise a published figure. We have no pick for Pirates against African Stars. Both Sundowns picks will be graded after the final whistle on the same rules as everything on our predictions page.

That line is the honest arithmetic behind two confident-looking picks. If both figures are right and the two games are independent, Sundowns win both legs 46.4 percent of the time. They can still go through without winning both, because the tie is decided on aggregate, but anyone treating the first leg in Lubango as a formality is reading more into a 58 percent figure than it holds.

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