Extra time football rules: what happens after 90 minutes

The board goes up at the end of the second half, the players who have just run for ninety-plus minutes drop where they stand, and a coach walks out to the centre circle with a folded piece of paper. The interval between full time and the restart is five minutes in most competitions, which is barely long enough to drink something and be told one thing. Extra time football rules give a manager less preparation for the most consequential half-hour of the season than a referee gets for a substitution, and the whole shape of the next thirty minutes is usually decided in that gap on the grass.

The answer to the plain question first. Extra time is two periods of fifteen minutes, played back to back with a change of ends between them, both played out in full regardless of who scores. Stoppage time is added to each period. If the sides are still level after those thirty minutes plus additions, the match goes to kicks from the penalty mark. No goal ends the match early, no lead at the halfway point ends it early, and nothing about the away venue affects it.

What Law 7 and Law 10 actually say about the thirty minutes

The rules governing extra time are split across two Laws, and neither is long.

Law 7 covers the duration of a match. It fixes normal play at two equal halves of forty-five minutes, sets the half-time interval at no more than fifteen minutes, and requires the referee to allow for time lost in each period. Its treatment of extra time is a single provision: a short drinks break, which should not exceed one minute, is permitted at the interval of half-time in extra time.

Law 10 covers how a drawn match produces a winner where the competition requires one. It lists the permitted methods, and the relevant one reads as two equal periods of extra time of not more than fifteen minutes each. The wording is worth reading closely, because it establishes two things at once. The periods must be equal, and fifteen minutes is a ceiling rather than a fixed value. A competition that wanted ten-minute periods would be within the Laws; none of the major ones do it, and thirty minutes has become the universal choice.

Neither Law says a goal ends the period. That silence is doing a lot of work, and it is the residue of an argument the game had and settled two decades ago.

• 2Periods of extra time played
• 15Maximum minutes in each period
• 1Maximum minutes for the drinks break between them
• 1Additional substitutes most competitions allow

Structural provisions from the Laws of the Game and standard competition regulations, not match data.

The five-minute wait, and why there is no proper interval

The break between the end of normal time and the start of extra time is set by competition regulation rather than by the Laws, and five minutes is the standard. The AFC's club competition regulations state it explicitly, and the same figure appears across European and domestic competition rulebooks.

That five minutes is not an interval in the technical sense. Players are not permitted to leave for the dressing room in most competitions, and the coaching happens on the pitch, usually in a huddle near the technical area. There is a practical reason for the brevity: a full break would let bodies cool and stiffen after ninety minutes of work, and the risk of soft-tissue injury on the restart rises sharply with that.

The turnaround between the two extra periods is shorter still. Teams change ends and restart, with the one-minute drinks break the Laws allow. There is no fifteen-minute interval, no team talk of any length, and no chance to reorganise beyond shouting.

This has a consequence that shows up in every match that runs the distance. The tactical adjustments a side makes for extra time are almost entirely made in that first five-minute window, and they tend to be simple: a change of shape, a substitution, an instruction about where to press or where to sit. Anything more sophisticated has to have been prepared before the match, which is why staff at clubs that expect knockout football rehearse the scenario in advance rather than improvising it on the night.

First half45min

Second half45min

First period of extra time15min

Second period of extra time15min

Playing time only. Stoppage time is added to every period and is not included here.

Show the numbers

How a match that goes the distance divides into playing periods

Item	Minutes
First half	45min
Second half	45min
First period of extra time	15min
Second period of extra time	15min

Stoppage time inside extra time

A frequent misreading is that the two extra periods run to a hard fifteen minutes each. They do not. The referee's obligation to allow for time lost applies to every period of play, so injuries, substitutions, goal celebrations, video reviews and time-wasting all generate additions inside extra time exactly as they do inside a half.

That means a period announced as fifteen minutes can run considerably longer, and the added time in the second extra period is frequently the most consequential passage of the match. A side needing a goal to avoid penalties gets whatever the referee has accumulated, and a side that would rather take its chances from twelve yards has an obvious incentive to slow the game down, which generates more additions in turn.

The Law that extends a half for a penalty kick applies here too. If a penalty has to be taken or retaken at the end of an extra period, the period is extended until it is complete. A tie can therefore end with a single kick taken after the clock has passed a hundred and twenty minutes, with no other play possible before or after it.

One thing does not carry over. The referee's discretion to add time is not a discretion to shorten a period. Time announced by the fourth official can be increased but never reduced, and that holds in extra time as in normal play.

The additional substitute and the additional window

Law 3 sets the framework for substitutions, and competitions set the numbers inside it. The standard arrangement in senior competition is five substitutes used across three opportunities, with the half-time interval not counting as one of those opportunities.

Once a match goes to extra time, most competitions grant one additional substitute and one additional substitution opportunity. The AFC regulations are typical in stating that this applies regardless of whether the club has already used its full allocation, which is the important clause. A manager who has made all five changes by the eightieth minute is not stranded; the extra period resets a slot.

This has quietly changed how the last half-hour of normal time is managed. Holding a substitute in reserve used to be a hedge against injury. Now a manager who suspects a match is heading to extra time has a real decision to make about whether to use a change at eighty-five minutes or bank the fresh legs for the hundred-and-fifth. Sides that carry a specialist in some phase of play, a set-piece target or a specific runner, will often hold that player back specifically for the extra periods, which is a different calculation from the one that governs a league match.

Concussion substitutions sit outside all of this. Where a competition has adopted the permanent concussion substitute provision, it can be used regardless of how many changes have already been made, and the opposing side receives a corresponding additional substitute. That allowance is not consumed by extra time and does not consume the extra-time allowance.

The golden goal: sudden death and what it did to matches

For roughly a decade the rules above did not apply, because a goal in extra time ended the match on the spot.

The golden goal entered the Laws in the early 1990s. The governing bodies chose that name over sudden death, which had been the working term and was thought to carry the wrong associations. The first competitive use came in March 1993, in a FIFA youth world championship quarter-final, and it spread from there into senior tournaments.

The reasoning was straightforward. Extra time under the ordinary rules had a reputation for producing thirty minutes of nothing, two exhausted sides holding their shape and waiting for penalties. A rule that ended the match at the first goal was supposed to make scoring irresistible, because the reward for it was total and immediate.

It produced the moments its designers wanted. A European Championship final at Wembley in 1996 was settled by a golden goal from Oliver Bierhoff, which was the first of its kind at a major international tournament and remains the only one to have decided a final of that stature. Two years later the first golden goal at a World Cup came from Laurent Blanc as France knocked Paraguay out in the round of sixteen. Further golden goals decided knockout matches at the 2002 World Cup, the last of them scored by İlhan Mansız for Turkey against Senegal in a quarter-final.

What the rule did not produce was more attacking football. The incentive it created cut both ways with equal force: scoring won the match instantly, and conceding lost it instantly. A side that had reached extra time by defending well now faced a version of the game in which a single lapse ended its season with no chance to respond. The rational reply to that is not to attack more. It is to attack less, keep the shape, and wait for an opportunity so clear that it carries no counter-attacking risk.

Referees came off badly too. Every decision in extra time became potentially final, since a penalty given, an offside missed or an advantage played could end the match within seconds. That is an unusual amount of weight to place on a judgement made at speed by a person who has also been running for two hours.

The silver goal: a compromise that lasted two seasons

The next attempt tried to keep some of the urgency while removing the instant guillotine.

Under the silver goal, a match did not end the moment a goal went in. It ended at the close of the first period of extra time if one side was ahead at that point. If the sides were level at the fifteen-minute mark, the second period was played in full and penalties followed if it settled nothing. UEFA adopted the rule for the 2002/03 season across its club competitions, describing the intention as encouraging positive play in the extra period while removing the pressure the golden goal had put on officials.

The design has a curious property that was noticed almost immediately. It converted the fifteen-minute mark into a hard deadline, which meant a side that scored in the ninety-fifth minute had twenty minutes to defend rather than the twenty-five it would have had in a golden-goal match and none at all under the old rules. Sides that went ahead early in the first extra period tended to retreat immediately, because a single equaliser before the whistle reopened everything, and sides that were behind had a shrinking window rather than a full half-hour to work in.

The rule lasted through the 2004 European Championship, where the only silver goal ever scored at a major international tournament arrived in the semi-final. Traianos Dellas headed in for Greece in the closing seconds of the first extra period against the Czech Republic, and the match ended on the whistle rather than at the restart. It is an unusually pure illustration of what the rule did: a goal that would have counted for nothing more than a lead under today's rules ended a European Championship semi-final on the spot.

Why the IFAB scrapped both, and what replaced them

The IFAB voted in February 2004 to remove both the golden goal and the silver goal from the Laws, having consulted associations around the world. The removal took effect after that summer's European Championship, so the 2006 World Cup was played under the restored rules and every major tournament since has used two full periods.

The reasoning that emerged from the discussion had three strands.

Neither rule delivered the attacking football that had justified it. Both had made extra time more cautious rather than less, because the downside of conceding had been sharpened more than the upside of scoring. That is the central finding, and it is the reverse of what the designers expected.

Both rules made the extra period unequal in a way ordinary extra time is not. Under the golden goal a side leading at any point never had to defend a lead at all, and under the silver goal the amount of defending required depended entirely on which minute the goal arrived in. Two teams in the same scoreline could face wildly different tasks.

And both were hard to explain. The IFAB discussion included the argument that extra time needed a simple system, and there is something to that. A supporter who has followed a match for two hours should not need to be told which of three tie-break regimes is in force before working out what a goal means.

What replaced them was the pre-1993 arrangement, unchanged: two periods, both played out, no sudden death of any kind. The main practical effect is that a goal scored in the ninety-fifth minute now has to be defended for twenty-five minutes plus additions, and a fair number of them are not.

1. 1Full time in normal playThe referee ends the second half after the announced additions. In a two-legged tie the two legs are added together at this point and only a level total continues.
2. 2Five-minute breakTeams stay on the pitch, take on fluid and receive instructions. Coaching happens on the grass rather than in the dressing room, and substitutions made here use the extra-time allowance.
3. 3First period of extra timeFifteen minutes plus additions. A goal changes the score and nothing else. Sides change ends at the end of it.
4. 4Drinks breakUp to one minute at the turnaround. There is no interval of the kind taken at half-time in normal play.
5. 5Second period of extra timeFifteen minutes plus additions. If a penalty has to be taken as the period expires, the period is extended until the kick is complete.
6. 6Kicks from the penalty markStill level and the match goes to the shoot-out, taken under the procedure the Laws set out.

The sequence used in competitions that play extra time. Rounds that skip extra time move straight from the first step to the last.

Which competitions play extra time, and which skip it

The Laws permit extra time; they do not require it. Each competition decides, and the decisions have drifted noticeably towards shorter matches as the calendar has filled up.

European club competition plays extra time in every two-legged knockout round when the aggregate is level, and in the finals, which are single matches. The knockout rounds sit behind a league phase that produces the seedings, and the structure of that phase is set out in the piece on how the league phase and the knockout ladder fit together.

England's two domestic cups now sit at opposite ends of the question. The FA Cup abolished replays from the first round proper ahead of the 2024/25 season, so every level match in the competition goes to extra time and then penalties on the night. The League Cup does the reverse in its early rounds, sending drawn matches straight to a shoot-out from the first round through the quarter-finals, and keeping extra time only for the two-legged semi-finals and the final.

Italy's cup made a similar reduction, removing extra time from its single-match rounds up to and including the quarter-finals from the 2024/25 season, with level matches going directly to penalties.

The Asian club competition plays extra time in its preliminary matches, in the second leg of round-of-sixteen pairings and in its centralised finals stage, which is a narrower application than the old two-legged format required.

The common thread is fixture load. Thirty minutes of maximum-intensity football is a genuine cost to a squad three days before a league match, and competitions have become willing to trade some of the jeopardy for the recovery time.

Two-legged ties: extra time only ever comes at the end

One point causes persistent confusion in the first leg of a knockout tie.

Extra time is never played at the end of a first leg, however the match finishes. The first leg is half of a fixture rather than a fixture in itself, and its result is a running total rather than a decision. A 1-1 draw in a first leg is not a drawn match requiring resolution; it is a scoreline carried forward.

Extra time attaches to the end of the second leg, and only when the aggregate is level at that point. It is played at the second leg's venue for the obvious reason that both squads are already there.

Since the away goals tie-break disappeared from European and South American competition, the arithmetic at the end of a second leg has become simpler than it was for the previous half-century, and the details of that change are covered in the piece on the removal of the away goals rule. What matters here is the consequence: a level aggregate now leads straight to the extra half-hour, without a tie-break in between.

Where the thirty minutes came from

The extra half-hour predates every tie-break argument in this article, and its origins explain why it is thirty minutes rather than some other figure.

For most of football's first century the answer to a drawn knockout match was to play it again. Replays were the default across British and European cup football, sometimes more than one of them, occasionally at a neutral ground. Extra time existed alongside that as a way of avoiding a replay where the calendar or the occasion demanded a result on the day, and a final was the obvious case. Two periods of fifteen sat naturally against two halves of forty-five: a third of a match, split the same way, with the ends changed so neither side spent the whole of it attacking the same goal.

The pressure that turned extra time from an occasional device into the standard came from the fixture list rather than from any principle. Replays require a free midweek, a second set of travel costs and a second policing operation, and as domestic and European calendars filled through the second half of the twentieth century the free midweeks disappeared. Competitions responded by cutting replays back round by round, then removing them entirely, which pushed the burden of producing a result onto extra time and the shoot-out.

England's oldest cup completed that journey recently. Replays were trimmed from the later rounds over several seasons and then removed from the first round proper altogether ahead of the 2024/25 competition, which means a tie that would once have produced a lucrative second match at a smaller club's ground is now settled in an extra half-hour and a shoot-out on the night. That was a contested decision for reasons that had nothing to do with the Laws, since a replay at a lower-league ground against top-flight opposition was among the largest single pieces of income a small club could receive.

What survives of the replay era is the shape of the thing itself. Thirty minutes in two halves is a fossil of a rule written when a football match meant ninety minutes and any extension had to look like a smaller version of one.

The argument about whether extra time should exist at all

Competitions have been quietly removing extra time from their early rounds for several seasons, and the debate behind that is worth setting out, because the direction of travel is not obvious from the Laws.

The case for cutting it is a physical one. Thirty minutes at knockout intensity, on top of ninety, on a squad that has a league fixture within seventy-two hours, is a load that shows up in the following weeks rather than on the night. Competitions with no broadcast obligation to fill the slot have little to gain from imposing it in a second-round tie in September, and the shoot-out produces a winner in ten minutes rather than forty.

The case against is that a shoot-out is a different test from football, and using it earlier in a competition means more ties decided by that different test. Extra time at least gives the side that has been the better team over ninety minutes a further half-hour in which that superiority might tell, and a proportion of level matches do resolve themselves in those thirty minutes without any need for penalties.

There is a third position, which is that the current mixture is the worst of both. A competition that plays extra time in some rounds and not others asks supporters to know which regime is in force before they can interpret a level score, and it applies the heavier physical burden to precisely the later rounds where squads are already most stretched. Nobody has proposed a tidy solution to that, and the Laws will accommodate any of the three, because Law 10 sets out what is permitted and leaves the choosing to whoever runs the tournament.

What the extra half-hour does to a match

The structural facts about extra time make some patterns very predictable, and it is worth separating those from the folklore.

The first is that fatigue is asymmetric between the sides. Two teams arrive at the ninety-first minute having covered different distances, made different numbers of sprints and used different numbers of substitutes. A side that has chased the ball for an hour is in a materially worse position than one that has held it, and that gap widens rather than closes over the next thirty minutes. This is one reason a possession-heavy side that has been frustrated for ninety minutes often looks stronger after the restart, and why a side defending a compact low block frequently concedes more space in the extra periods than it did before them.

The second is that cramp changes what teams can do rather than just how well they do it. A player who cannot sprint is a positional player for the remainder of the match, and a team with three such players cannot press, cannot counter-attack at speed and cannot defend a high line. Shapes narrow, distances between the lines shorten, and the game becomes slower and more territorial almost mechanically.

The third is that set pieces become disproportionately important. A dead ball needs no sprint, rewards height and rehearsal rather than running capacity, and can be delivered by a substitute who has been on the pitch for six minutes. Sides that invest in rehearsed set-piece routines are getting more return from that investment in the extra periods than at any other point in a match.

The fourth is the shoot-out shadow. Both managers know that a level score at a hundred and twenty minutes leads to penalties, and both are making selection decisions with that in mind: which takers are on the pitch, whether to use a change on a specialist, and whether a goalkeeper substitution is available and worth making. That set of decisions belongs to a different article, and the rules and mechanics of the shoot-out itself are covered there rather than here.

What to watch for once the board goes up

A few things are worth looking at specifically in the five minutes before extra time starts, because they tell you what each side has decided.

Watch who is standing and who is sitting. Players who go down flat at the whistle and need help up are usually not going to last the full thirty minutes, and a manager who sees three of them has a substitution decision made for him.

Watch the substitution. Most sides use the extra-time allowance immediately rather than saving it, because a fresh player is worth more across thirty minutes than across ten. A manager who holds it back is usually protecting against injury or planning to change something after seeing the first period.

Watch the shape rather than the personnel. Sides that have decided to win the match in extra time push a full-back higher or move a midfielder forward. Sides that have decided to reach penalties drop a line, narrow the gaps and stop committing anybody beyond the ball. The change is usually visible within two minutes of the restart and it is a better guide to intent than anything said afterwards.

Watch the clock at the end of the first period. Since the silver goal was abolished, nothing happens at the fifteen-minute mark except a change of ends, but a side that has just scored will often behave as though something does, retreating for a few minutes before remembering it has another quarter of an hour to survive.

And watch the officials in the last five minutes. Every decision carries more weight than it did at the same stage of normal time, because there is no further period of play in which a wronged side can respond, and the video review process applies to those minutes exactly as it applies to any other.

For the wider set of laws that govern what happens inside those thirty minutes, from offside to handball to the referee's discretion over added time, the football section collects the explainers, and the full archive covers the equivalent ground in other sports where overtime works to a different set of rules entirely.