Explainer
Football injury time stoppages: where the minutes go
Which events take play out of a football match, why the ball is in play for well under an hour, how sides waste time and what the countermeasures changed.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Explainer18 min read
A goalkeeper collects a cross in the eighty-fourth minute with his side a goal ahead, and the next thirty seconds are entirely predictable. He goes to ground rather than staying on his feet. He rises slowly. He looks for a long option that he has no intention of using. Somewhere in there a defender needs his sock adjusted. None of this is against the Laws in any way a referee can easily punish, and all of it works, because football injury time stoppages are handled by a running clock that never pauses and a compensation payment made at the end.
The short answer to the question underneath all of this is worth stating plainly. Nothing in football stops the clock. The referee's watch runs from the first whistle of a half to the last, and every interruption is dealt with afterwards, as an allowance added on. What actually happens during a match is that the ball goes out of play, over and over, for reasons ranging from a routine throw-in to a stretcher, and the accumulated dead time is very large: in the English top flight the ball has been in play for somewhere in the middle fifties of minutes per game across recent seasons, inside a match that now regularly lasts more than a hundred. How the referee arrives at the number the fourth official holds up is a separate question, worked through in how the added time figure is actually built. This piece is about the other side of that transaction: what takes the football out of the ninety minutes in the first place.
- Ball in play54.7%
- Dead time45.3%
Premier League averages for the opening weeks of the 2025/26 season: a total elapsed match time of one hundred minutes and thirty-five seconds, of which fifty-five minutes was ball in play and forty-five minutes thirty-five seconds was not. An in-season snapshot, not a final season figure.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Ball in play | 55min |
| Dead time | 45.6min |
What Law 9 counts as out of play, and why the running clock ignores it
Law 9 is one of the shortest Laws in the book and it does one job. The ball is out of play when it has wholly passed over the goal line or the touchline, on the ground or in the air, and when play has been stopped by the referee. It is in play at all other times, including when it rebounds off a goalpost, a crossbar or a corner flag post and stays on the field.
There is a third case that people forget and it produces some of the strangest restarts in the game. If the ball touches a match official while it is on the field of play, it is normally still in play. It becomes out of play only if, as a result of that contact, a team starts a promising attack, the ball goes directly into the goal, or the team in possession changes. In those three situations play restarts with a dropped ball, which is why you occasionally see a game halted because the referee was in the wrong place and nobody has been fouled.
Nothing in Law 9 says anything about time. That is the whole point. The Laws separate the question of whether the ball is playable from the question of how long the half lasts, and only Law 7 deals with the second one. A throw-in that takes twenty-five seconds and a throw-in that takes five are identical under Law 9 and very different under Law 7, and the difference only becomes visible in the fourth official's number at the end of a half.
Dead time and lost time are two different ledgers
This is the distinction that resolves most arguments about stoppages, and almost nobody separates the two.
Dead time is every second the ball is not in play. A goal kick, a throw-in, a corner being taken, the walk to a free kick, a substitution, a goal celebration, a booking, treatment for an injury, a video check, the ball in the crowd. Add it all up and you get the difference between a hundred-minute afternoon and fifty-five minutes of football.
Lost time is the much smaller subset that Law 7 requires the referee to give back. The Law lists substitutions, the assessment or removal of injured players, wasting time, disciplinary sanctions, medical stoppages permitted by the competition, delays relating to video checks and reviews, goal celebrations, and any other cause including a significant delay to a restart.
Look at what is missing from that list. An ordinary throw-in is not lost playing time. Nor is an ordinary goal kick, an ordinary corner, or an ordinary free kick taken at a reasonable pace. Those interruptions are simply part of how football works, and the Laws treat the ninety minutes as containing them by definition. Only the abnormal version of a restart, the one delayed on purpose or by an incident, becomes a ledger entry.
That is why a match can lose forty-five minutes of dead time and be given back only five. The forty minutes not returned are not an oversight. They are the sport's own definition of what a half consists of, and the argument about the stopped clock is at bottom an argument about whether that definition is still the right one.
Where the missing half hour actually goes
The interesting number is not the total. It is the distribution, because the distribution tells you which behaviours are worth legislating against.
Restarts dominate. Measurements of the English top flight put the average corner kick at roughly thirty-seven seconds from the ball going out to the ball being back in play in the current season, a goal kick at around thirty seconds, and a throw-in at close to eighteen. Each of those figures rose by two to three seconds from the previous season, which sounds trivial until you multiply it by the number of restarts in a match.
The multiplication is where the damage is. A match contains dozens of throw-ins, twenty or so goal kicks, and a handful of corners. Two extra seconds on a throw-in that happens fifty times is a hundred seconds gone, and nobody watching can point to the moment it happened. Time is not lost in the dramatic incidents that get talked about afterwards. It leaks, three seconds at a time, from events so ordinary that no referee is going to stop the match to deal with them.
Fouls are the other structural drain, and they are self-reinforcing. A free kick in a dangerous area requires a wall, a wall requires the 9.15 metres to be established, and establishing it takes as long as the defending side wants it to take up to the point where the referee produces a card. A side that fouls tactically in midfield is buying two things at once: a broken attack, and twenty seconds of dead time.
Effective playing time, and how far below ninety it really sits
Effective playing time is the measured total of minutes with the ball in play, and it is the number that should be quoted whenever anybody says a football match lasts ninety minutes.
In the English top flight the figure has moved in a narrow band and then jumped. It sat a little under fifty-five minutes in the two seasons before timekeeping was tightened. It rose above fifty-eight minutes in the first season under stricter accounting, fell back to just under fifty-seven in the following one, and has been measured around fifty-five minutes in the opening weeks of the current campaign, which is roughly fifty-five per cent of a match that now averages more than a hundred minutes in total.
Two things follow from that series and both are uncomfortable.
The first is that the improvement was real and has partly decayed. Adding time back does raise the amount of football played, because the extra minutes at the end of each half are minutes in which the ball is usually in play. It does not stop the leak, though, and once players and coaches adjusted to longer added periods the dead time crept up again. The most recent restart durations are all higher than the year before, which is the leak reasserting itself.
The second is that the ceiling is lower than people assume. Even a perfectly conducted match with no time wasting at all contains a great deal of legitimate dead ball. Goals have to be restarted, the ball has to be retrieved, injuries have to be treated. The realistic target for a well-run match is not ninety minutes of football. It is somewhere in the low sixties, and the argument is about the twenty minutes between that and where the game currently sits.
Season averages converted to decimal minutes from published figures in minutes and seconds. The final point is an in-season snapshot for 2025/26 rather than a completed season average.
Show the numbers
| Item | Minutes the ball was in play |
|---|---|
| 2021/22 | 54.8min |
| 2022/23 | 54.8min |
| 2023/24 | 58.2min |
| 2024/25 | 57min |
| 2025/26 | 55min |
Why the same stoppage is worth more to one side than the other
Stoppages are not neutral, and this is the mechanism that makes time wasting rational rather than merely irritating.
A side that is ahead wants the number of remaining football-seconds to be as small as possible, because every second is an opportunity for the opponent to score. A side that is behind wants the opposite. The two teams therefore have precisely opposed interests in every dead-ball situation, and one of them controls each one.
The control matters more than the arithmetic. A goal kick belongs to the defending side. A throw-in belongs to whoever the ball came off. A free kick belongs to the side that was fouled. A substitution belongs to the team making it. In each case the team that holds the restart chooses the pace, and a team protecting a lead holds a surprising number of them precisely because it is defending, which is to say conceding corners, throw-ins and goal kicks.
The cost of abusing that control has historically been low. Delaying the restart of play is a cautionable offence under Law 12, but a referee has one yellow card per player and a long list of other things to spend it on, and a booking issued in the eighty-eighth minute to a defender who will not be playing again for two minutes is not much of a deterrent. Time wasting was, for most of football's history, an offence with a punishment that arrived too late and cost too little.
That asymmetry is the entire reason the recent rule changes have moved away from cards and towards restarts. Handing the ball to the opposition costs the offending side something immediately, in the currency they were trying to protect.
Injuries, the assessment, and the rule that made treatment expensive
Genuine injury is the one stoppage nobody argues should be discouraged, and it is also the one most easily borrowed for other purposes.
The Laws deal with the honest case straightforwardly. Play is stopped if the referee judges a player to be seriously injured, the player is assessed and if necessary removed, and the time is measured and returned under Law 7. Nothing about that is controversial, and the protocol around head injuries in particular has moved firmly towards stopping play early rather than late.
The dishonest case was harder. A player who goes down at a convenient moment, receives brief attention and is back on his feet within the minute has bought his side a stoppage at no cost. Refereeing instruction has long tried to handle this by requiring a treated player to leave the field before rejoining, but a player who leaves and immediately returns has lost nothing.
The 2026/27 amendment closes that particular door. A player who receives an on-field assessment, or for whom play is stopped, must now leave the field of play and stay off it for one minute of running clock after play has restarted. The treatment is unaffected. What has gone is the free option, because the side that pauses the game now plays a man short for the minute that follows, and a coach weighing whether to send the physio on has a real cost to weigh.
The design principle is worth noticing because it recurs throughout this subject. The rule does not attempt to distinguish a genuine injury from a convenient one, which no referee can reliably do. It makes the two equally expensive, and lets the team decide.
- The ball wholly crosses the goal lineUnder Law 9 it is out of play the instant the whole of the ball has passed the line, on the ground or in the air. The clock does not react in any way. The referee signals a goal kick by pointing towards the goal area.
- The ball is retrievedIf the ball has gone into the crowd or behind the stand, this can take a while. Competitions with a multi-ball system hand a replacement to the goalkeeper within seconds, which is why the practice spread so quickly.
- The goalkeeper walks to the ballThis is the softest part of the sequence and the easiest to lengthen without appearing to do anything. A slow walk from the far post costs several seconds and looks like nothing at all.
- The defenders take up positionSides that build from the back arrange full-backs wide and centre-backs on the edge of the goal area, which is a genuine tactical setup and also a legitimate-looking reason to take time.
- The referee judges whether it is being delayedFrom the 2026/27 Laws, a goal kick the referee considers deliberately delayed triggers a visible five-second countdown. The count is public so that nobody can claim to have been surprised by it.
- The countdown expires or the ball is playedIf the ball is not in play by the end of the count, the opposing team is awarded a corner kick. That is a considerably sharper sanction than a caution, because it converts stolen seconds into a scoring opportunity.
- The ball is in playThe ball is in play once it is kicked and clearly moves, and it may be played inside the penalty area. The whole interval, from crossing the line to this moment, is dead time and only the abnormal part of it is lost time under Law 7.
The ordinary sequence, with the points at which the 2026/27 countdown can be applied. Under the current measurements this whole sequence averages around half a minute.
Time wasting as a strategy, and what a team is actually buying
It helps to think about this from the bench rather than from the stand, because from the bench it is a straightforward calculation.
A side leading by one goal with ten minutes left has to survive a certain number of opposition possessions. Each possession carries a probability of conceding. Removing thirty seconds of football removes, on average, part of a possession, and the probability of conceding falls by a small amount. Repeat that a dozen times across the closing period and the aggregate is not small at all.
Against that, the cost. A caution, possibly. A referee who becomes less sympathetic on marginal decisions. Added time, which under strict accounting gives back some of what was taken. And, since the recent changes, the direct loss of possession or territory at a restart.
For most of football's history the first column was much larger than the second, which is why every serious team did it and why the moralising about it always missed the point. Coaches were responding correctly to the incentives the Laws created. Changing the behaviour was never going to be a matter of persuasion.
There is a second, subtler use of dead time that is not really time wasting at all and is often mistaken for it. Stoppages are the only moments in a football match when a coach can communicate with the whole team, and a side that has just conceded, or that needs to change shape, will use a goal kick or a throw-in to do it. A slow restart after a goal against is frequently reorganisation rather than cynicism, and the two look identical from the stand.
The goalkeeper holding rule, from four steps to eight seconds
No single provision illustrates the history of this problem better than the limit on how long a goalkeeper may hold the ball, because it has been rewritten repeatedly and only the most recent version has worked.
The original constraint was on movement rather than time. A goalkeeper was allowed four steps while holding the ball, which produced a generation of keepers who bounced the ball, took four more steps, bounced it again, and effectively wandered wherever they liked. The Laws replaced the step count with a time limit in 2000, and the limit was six seconds, with an indirect free kick to the opposition inside the penalty area as the sanction.
That rule failed for a reason worth understanding, because it is a general lesson about sanctions. The punishment was catastrophic and therefore unusable. An indirect free kick inside the six-yard area is close to a free shot at goal, and no referee was going to award one because a goalkeeper had taken seven seconds instead of six. The six-second rule was therefore in the book, universally known, and almost never enforced. Goalkeepers routinely held the ball for two or three times the limit and nothing happened.
The IFAB amended Law 12.2 with effect from 1 July 2025 and the change is instructive on both counts. The limit was raised to eight seconds, which is closer to what a goalkeeper actually needs, and the sanction was reduced to a corner kick, which is a genuine but proportionate cost. The referee decides when control has been established, and counts the last five seconds down visibly with a raised hand, so the goalkeeper receives an unmistakable warning before anything is given. The new rule was used at the expanded FIFA club competition in the summer of 2025 before spreading through the domestic game.
The result is that a limit that had been dead letter for a quarter of a century became live. Goalkeepers changed behaviour almost immediately, not because they were cautioned but because the sanction was small enough that referees would actually apply it. A rule nobody enforces is not a rule, and a rule with a punishment that is too severe is a rule nobody enforces.
The back-pass law, and the countermeasure that changed the sport
The most effective anti-time-wasting measure ever introduced was not aimed at the clock at all. It was aimed at possession, and it changed how football is played.
Before 1992, a defender could pass the ball to his own goalkeeper, who could pick it up. A side protecting a lead could therefore hold the ball indefinitely at the back with no risk whatsoever, and the tournament football of the era became notorious for it. The IFAB's response was to make it an offence for a goalkeeper to handle a ball deliberately kicked to him by a team-mate, punished by an indirect free kick.
The immediate effect was the intended one: a route to safe, sterile possession disappeared. The lasting effect was far larger and entirely unplanned. Goalkeepers had to become footballers, defenders had to be comfortable receiving under pressure, and pressing the opposition's build-up became worth doing because there was now something to press. Half of modern tactical football, including the entire argument about playing out from the back, descends from a rule written to stop teams running down the clock.
That is the most encouraging precedent in this whole subject. The countermeasure that worked best did not police behaviour. It removed the option.
Two other countermeasures deserve a mention for contrast. The multi-ball system, where spare balls are held around the perimeter and handed to players immediately, is a competition-level operational fix rather than a Law, and it removes several seconds from every restart at essentially no cost. And the tightening of timekeeping instruction that spread through the game from the 2022 World Cup onwards attacked the accounting rather than the behaviour, with the results visible in the ball-in-play series above: a real gain, followed by partial decay.
Substitutions, and the stoppage that acquired a tactical purpose
Substitutions are the clearest case of a stoppage whose value grew until the Laws had to respond.
Five substitutions per side, made in three windows, gives a team more opportunities to stop the game than it used to have, and the substitution is uniquely suited to time wasting because the departing player controls the pace and the referee cannot reasonably hurry a man who is walking. The full procedure and the constraints around it are set out in the substitution rules and how the windows work.
The 2026/27 answer is a deadline with teeth. A substituted player must be off the field of play within ten seconds of the substitution board being displayed, or of the referee's signal where no board is used. If they are not, the replacement is not permitted to enter until the first stoppage after a minute of running time has elapsed following the restart. The side that took the extra seconds plays a man short for a minute, which converts the gain into a loss without requiring the referee to make any judgement about intent.
The pattern is now recognisable across all of the recent changes. The Laws have stopped trying to detect bad faith and started pricing behaviour. Leave the field slowly and you play short. Hold the ball too long and you concede a corner. Delay a throw-in and you lose it. None of these require a referee to read anybody's mind, which is what makes them enforceable.
Video checks, and the stoppage that produces no restart
Video review is the newest large stoppage and the one most often blamed for match length, which is not quite fair.
Law 7 explicitly names delays relating to video checks and reviews as lost playing time, so the interval is measured and returned. A silent check that resolves in a few seconds costs a few seconds. An on-field review, with a walk to the monitor and back, costs the whole excursion, and those are the ones people remember. The mechanics of what is happening during that pause are covered in how video assistance works in practice.
Two things separate a video stoppage from every other kind. It is not chosen by either team, so neither side can use it strategically, and the tactical asymmetry that drives ordinary time wasting simply does not apply. And it frequently occurs at a moment when the ball was already out of play, after a goal or in a penalty situation, so part of its cost overlaps with dead time that was happening anyway.
The genuine complaint about review stoppages is not their length but their shape. A delay of ninety seconds with no football to watch and no idea what is being considered feels far longer than a delay of the same length spent watching an injured player being treated. That is a communication problem rather than a timekeeping one, and the competitions that have started announcing review outcomes over the public address system are addressing it in the right place.
The case for a stopped clock
The proposal is not new and it is not fringe. The IFAB's own strategy document in 2017, published under the title Play Fair, floated a match of sixty minutes with the clock stopped every time the ball went out of play, and its stated reason was blunt: too many ninety-minute matches contain well under sixty minutes of actual football. The idea has never been adopted at senior level, but it has never gone away either.
The arguments in its favour are strong.
It removes the incentive entirely. A team that wastes thirty seconds gains nothing, because the thirty seconds are not deducted from anything. Every countermeasure discussed above exists to make time wasting expensive, and a stopped clock makes it worthless, which is a cleaner solution than a growing list of sanctions.
It makes the product honest. A stadium clock showing sixty minutes of playing time, visible to everyone, is a promise that can be kept. The current arrangement advertises ninety and delivers something in the fifties, and the gap is filled by a number invented at the end of each half by one person.
It removes an entire category of argument. Nobody would need to work out whether the fourth official's board was right, because there would be no board.
And it is not exotic. Several sports run stopped clocks and the tactical problems this creates are well understood, because the leagues that use them have already solved most of them.
The case against a stopped clock, which is stronger than it looks
The objections are not nostalgia, though nostalgia is certainly present.
The first is that the running clock is not merely a timekeeping method, it is a design feature of how football is played. The knowledge that the clock is running shapes urgency in a way that a stopped clock removes. A side chasing a goal with five minutes on a running clock is in a different psychological situation from a side with five minutes of stopped-clock time, which is worth considerably more. Whether that changes the game for better or worse is a matter of taste, but it does change it.
The second is that a stopped clock creates its own tactics, and they are not obviously better. A period at the end of a half where a side deliberately puts the ball out to force a stoppage becomes rational rather than pointless. Fouling to stop the clock becomes a coherent strategy. Every sport with a stopped clock has an endgame that looks nothing like the rest of the contest, and football's endgame at present, whatever its faults, is still football.
The third is scale, and it is the one that usually settles the argument. The Laws of the Game are the same laws in a Sunday league park match and a World Cup final, and that universality is unusual and valuable. A stopped clock requires a reliable timekeeper, equipment, and an official whose job is to operate it. Most football in the world has one referee, no assistants, and a watch. A Law that only works in stadiums with a fourth official and a scoreboard is not a Law of the Game, it is a competition rule, and the IFAB has been consistently reluctant to split the sport in two.
The fourth is that the alternative is working, partially. The measured gains from stricter accounting were real, and the newer sanctions on goalkeepers, substitutions and delayed restarts attack the causes at a cost of nothing. If the leak can be closed by pricing the behaviour, the more radical surgery is not needed.
What to watch if you want to know whether a match is being slowed
Judging this from the stand is easier than it sounds, and it does not require a stopwatch.
Count restarts rather than incidents. Pick a five-minute passage in the second half and count how many throw-ins, goal kicks and free kicks occur, then notice how many of them are taken within a few seconds. A match with quick restarts feels fast because it is fast, and the difference between an eight-second throw-in and a twenty-second one is visible without measuring it.
Watch which side holds the restarts. If the leading team is taking every goal kick, every throw-in in its own half and every free kick, the pace of the match is in its hands, and you can predict most of the remaining stoppages before they happen.
Watch the referee's hand for a countdown. Five fingers going down means a specific sanction is about to be applied, and it also tells you the referee has decided the delay is deliberate rather than incidental. A referee who counts down twice in ten minutes has made a judgement about how the match is being managed by one of the teams.
Watch what happens after a goal. The reset is the single largest discretionary stoppage in football, and the difference between a side that jogs back to the halfway line and one that takes a lap of the away end is measured directly in the added period.
And watch the substitutions in the final ten minutes. A change made in the eighty-eighth minute is almost never about football. The player coming off knows it, the crowd knows it, and since 2026/27 the ten-second requirement means the referee has an answer that does not depend on knowing it too.
For the other half of this subject, which is how the referee turns all of it into a number, the added time calculation and what the board actually reports covers the ledger in detail. If a match runs past the added period without a winner, the rules governing extra time take over, and the decisions that most often produce the longest single stoppage in a match are unpacked in the handball law and its deliberate ambiguity. The tactical consequences of a goalkeeper who now has eight seconds rather than an argument are worth reading alongside what goalkeeper distribution data actually shows.
More on the Laws, the tactics and the economics of the game sits in our football section, and every explainer we have written across all sports is listed in the blog.
Common questions
How much of a football match is the ball actually in play?
In the English top flight the measured average has sat in the middle fifties of minutes for most of the past five seasons, rising above fifty-eight minutes in the season after timekeeping was tightened and settling back since. Against a total match length now above a hundred minutes, that means the ball is out of play for close to half of the time supporters are in the ground. Lower divisions have historically been worse, with League Two once measured below half the match.
Does the clock ever stop in football?
No. The referee's watch runs continuously from the first whistle of a half to the last, and every interruption is dealt with afterwards by adding an allowance at the end. That is the structural difference between football and the sports it is usually compared with, and it is the reason time wasting is worth attempting at all.
What counts as time wasting in football?
Law 7 names wasting time as a category of lost playing time, and Law 12 makes delaying the restart of play a cautionable offence. In practice it covers a slow walk from the pitch when substituted, a goalkeeper drying a ball that is already dry, a throw-in taken by the wrong player, treatment sought for a knock that needs none, and any deliberate lengthening of a dead-ball situation by a team that is ahead.
How long can a goalkeeper hold the ball?
Eight seconds from the moment the referee judges control has been established. The referee counts down the last five of those seconds with a raised hand, and if the ball is not released in time the opposing team is awarded a corner kick. The previous limit was six seconds with an indirect free kick as the sanction, which was almost never given.
Why does football not use a stopped clock?
Mainly because the running clock is woven into how the sport is played, watched and scheduled, and because the proposed cure has costs of its own: a shorter nominal match, a new set of tactics built around clock stoppages, and a dependency on timekeeping equipment that most of the world's football does not have. The IFAB floated a sixty-minute stopped clock in its Play Fair strategy document in 2017 and it has never been adopted at senior level.
Do goal kicks and throw-ins now have a time limit?
From the 2026/27 Laws, yes in effect. Where the referee judges a throw-in or goal kick is being deliberately delayed, a five-second visual countdown is started, and if the ball is not in play by the end of it the throw-in is given to the opponents and the goal kick becomes a corner. The same countdown principle was already applied to goalkeepers holding the ball.
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