Countries with the Most AFC Asian Cup Titles

Nations ranked by AFC Asian Cup titles won. Japan leads on four, ahead of Iran and Saudi Arabia on three each, with Qatar and South Korea on two.

Eight different nations have won this tournament, and the seventeen titles in this table are spread more evenly than in most continental competitions. Japan's four wins amount to 23.5 percent of them; the top three winners hold ten of the seventeen between them, or 58.8 percent. For comparison, a single country holds a far larger share of titles in the equivalent South American and African competitions.

The distribution reflects how much the balance of power in Asian football has moved. South Korea's two titles came in the tournament's earliest years, while Japan won all four of theirs after 1990 — the country did not win the competition at all before then. Qatar's two titles are both recent. Australia, which appears here with one, only joined the Asian confederation in 2006 after leaving Oceania, and won the tournament within a decade of switching.

The three single-title winners — Australia, Iraq and Kuwait — are a reminder that this is a competition where an outsider can win outright rather than merely reaching a final.

One note on scope: this counts titles only, not finals reached or matches played, so a nation that has lost several finals without winning does not appear at all. The tournament has also changed size repeatedly, from four teams in its first edition to twenty-four today, which means the difficulty of winning it has not been constant across the totals shown here.