Regulations published for the 2026 TELUS Canadian Championship

Canada Soccer has published the Regulations for the 2026 TELUS Canadian Championship, the nation’s highest domestic knockout tournament featuring clubs from coast to coast competing for the Voyageurs Cup. The competition brings together 15 qualified clubs from Major League Soccer, the Canadian Premier League, and Premier Soccer Leagues Canada to determine Canada’s best team in the annual Battle of the North. Winners of the domestic TELUS Canadian Championship qualify for the annual international competition Concacaf Champions Cup on the road to the FIFA Club World Cup.

Regulations for the 2026 TELUS Canadian Championship

The 2026 TELUS Canadian Championship begins with 14 teams competing in the Preliminary Round across seven knockout matches scheduled from 5-10 May. The winners of those seven matches advance to the Quarter-Final Round which will be a home-and-away series kicking off this July. Already pre-seeded into the Quarter-Final Round is Vancouver Whitecaps FC, the top club in the Canadian Championship Ranking Index who are also the four-time defending champions of the Voyageurs Cup.

New this year, the top-four ranked clubs on the Canadian Championship Ranking Index do not meet each other before the Semi-Final Round. This meant that Vancouver Whitecaps FC, Forge FC Hamilton, Toronto FC and CF Montréal all have different pathways to the TELUS Canadian Championship Final.

Reintroduced through the Regulations for this year’s competition will be extra time in the case that any round is tied. This means that any of the seven Preliminary Round matches that are tied after 90 minutes will go to extra time before it potentially goes to penalties. The same applies for the single-match Final on 21 October. For any of the two-match series in the Quarter-Final and Semi-Final Rounds, if the series is tied on aggregate after the second leg, then an additional 30 minutes will be played before the series potentially goes to penalties.

Fans can follow all the action from the 2026 TELUS Canadian Championship live on OneSoccer, available on the fuboTV Canada platform, as a linear channel on Telus’s Optik TV (Channel 980), as well as online at OneSoccer.ca and through the OneSoccer app. Fans will find extended coverage across Canada Soccer’s digital channels on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X , and YouTube featuring the hashtag #CanChamp.