Penalty shootout rules explained: Law 10 step by step

The referee's whistle ends extra time, the ball is placed on the centre spot and twenty-two players walk towards one goal without being told which one. That short walk is already governed. Which goal, who kicks first, who is allowed to kick at all and where everyone else has to stand are all settled by a single section of the Laws before the first ball is struck.

The penalty shootout rules sit in Law 10 of the IFAB Laws of the Game, under the heading "Penalties (penalty shoot-out)", and the short version is this. Each side takes five kicks from the penalty mark, the teams alternate, and the side that scores more wins. If the score is still level after five each, the kicks continue one per side until one team scores from a kick and the other does not from the same numbered attempt. Only players on the field of play when the match ended may take one, and if one team has more of those players than the other, it must reduce until the numbers match.

Everything else in this piece is detail hanging off those four sentences, and the detail matters, because most of the moments that get argued about afterwards are covered explicitly by a clause that nobody in the ground has read.

• 5Kicks each side takes in the first round
• 2Coin tosses before the first kick
• 3Ways Law 10 allows a drawn match to produce a winner
• 11Metres from the penalty mark to the goal line

Structural provisions of Law 10 and Law 1. Not match figures.

What Law 10 permits, and why a shoot-out is not part of the match

Law 10 covers how the outcome of a match is determined, and it lists exactly three procedures a competition may use to find a winner when a knockout tie is level. Away goals, two equal periods of extra time of no more than fifteen minutes each, and penalties. A competition may combine them or use only one, but it may not invent a fourth.

The first thing to understand about the kicks is that they are not part of the match. The Laws are explicit that they take place after the match has ended, which is why a shoot-out score is not added to the result and a hat-trick in the kicks is not a hat-trick. It is also why the disciplinary slate is partly wiped: cautions shown during the match do not carry forward into the kicks, so a player on a yellow card starts the shoot-out clean.

The exception runs the other way. A player sent off before the final whistle takes no part in the kicks and cannot be replaced. That dismissal follows his team into a procedure that is technically not part of the match it happened in.

The two coin tosses that happen before anyone kicks

There are two tosses and they decide different things, which is why the ritual looks longer than it needs to.

The first decides the goal. The referee tosses, and the outcome determines which end the kicks are taken at. That choice can only be changed afterwards for safety reasons, or if the goal or the playing surface at that end has become unusable. Ends are not swapped halfway through a shoot-out. Every kick in the sequence is taken at the same goal, which is the reason the choice of end is worth a toss of its own: one set of supporters is behind the goal for the whole thing.

The second toss decides order. The team that wins it chooses whether to take the first kick or the second. This is a choice, not an allocation, and it is the only strategic decision either captain gets to make before the kicking starts. Most choose to go first.

Neither team has to tell the referee its order of kickers. Each side works out its own sequence privately, and a coach who wants his fifth-choice taker to go first is entitled to arrange it without informing anybody. The referee's only interest in the order is that each eligible player takes one before anyone takes a second.

Who is allowed to kick, and the rule that forces a team to reduce

Eligibility freezes at the final whistle. Any player on the field of play when the match ended may take a kick, and so may a player who was temporarily off it with the referee's permission, for an injury or to correct his equipment. Everybody else, including unused substitutes and players who were substituted earlier, is out.

That produces the provision people find strangest. If one team finishes with more players on the pitch than the other, because the other has had a player sent off or has an injured player it could not replace, the larger team must reduce its number to match. The captain and coach choose who is excluded, and they must tell the referee who it is. The excluded player takes no part in the kicks.

The reasoning is a fairness argument about the depth of the list rather than about the numbers on the pitch. A side with eleven eligible kickers and a side with ten do not face the same task at the fifth kick, because the eleven-man side never has to hand the ball to its weakest taker. Reducing to equate removes that difference.

Goalkeepers are treated separately, and sensibly. If a goalkeeper is unable to continue during the kicks, he may be replaced by a player who was excluded under the reduce-to-equate rule, or by an unused substitute if his team has not already used its full allocation of substitutions. The goalkeeper who came off cannot then return to take a kick. Any eligible outfield player may also swap places with the goalkeeper at any point, which is why a defender occasionally ends up in gloves for one kick.

Where everyone stands while a kick is being taken

Only eligible players and the match officials are allowed on the field of play during the kicks. That leaves a specific and rather odd arrangement.

The kicker stands at the penalty mark. The defending goalkeeper stands on his goal line. Every other eligible player from both teams, from both squads, waits inside the centre circle, which is why the pictures always show two sets of players in the same small ring with their arms round each other. The kicking side's own goalkeeper is the exception: he stays on the field but outside the penalty area being used, on the goal line where it meets the boundary of that penalty area.

The practical effect is that a goalkeeper who is about to face five kicks spends the intervening minutes standing near the corner of his own eighteen-yard box, at the wrong end, watching. Nobody may leave the circle to talk to the taker on his way to the spot, and the referee will keep them there.

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• The kicker at the penalty mark1
• The defending goalkeeper on the goal line1
• The kicking side's goalkeeper by the penalty area boundary1
• Remaining eligible players in the centre circle19

An illustration of the arrangement required by Law 10 with eleven eligible players on each side. The count in the centre circle falls if either team has fewer eligible players.

Show the numbers

Where the players are during a single kick

Item	Value
The kicker at the penalty mark	1
The defending goalkeeper on the goal line	1
The kicking side's goalkeeper by the penalty area boundary	1
Remaining eligible players in the centre circle	19

What the kick itself has to look like

The kick is taken under the same requirements as a penalty kick in normal play, set out in Law 14, with the shoot-out's own adjustments layered on top.

The ball must be stationary on the penalty mark, which sits eleven metres from the goal line, with part of it touching or overhanging the centre of the mark. The kicker must be identified, and must kick the ball forward. Back-heeling is legal provided the ball travels forwards. The ball is in play once it is kicked and clearly moves.

The defending goalkeeper must remain on the goal line, facing the kicker, between the posts, until the ball is kicked, and at the moment of the kick he must have at least part of one foot touching the goal line, in line with it, or behind it. That last wording is the one that changed the picture. A goalkeeper may lift a foot, may move along the line, and may have one foot well in front of it, provided some part of the other is still on or behind it when the kick happens.

Feinting is allowed during the run-up and not after it. A stutter or a pause on the way to the ball is legal. Stopping once the run-up has been completed, so that the goalkeeper commits and the kicker then strikes, is an offence. In normal play that produces a caution and an indirect free kick to the defending side. In a shoot-out the kick is recorded as missed and the taker is cautioned.

Encroachment, the double touch and who gets punished

Three infringements account for almost every retake or disallowed kick, and the Laws treat them asymmetrically because the two sides are not in the same position.

If the goalkeeper offends, by leaving the line early or by any other offence, and the kick is missed or saved, the kick is retaken. If the kick goes in, the goal stands and nothing further happens, because retaking a scored kick would punish the team that was offended against. The goalkeeper is warned for a first offence and cautioned for any offence after it, which means a keeper who edges forward twice is on a yellow card for the rest of the shoot-out.

If the kicker offends after the referee has signalled, the kick is recorded as missed and the kicker is cautioned. There is no retake in his favour.

If both offend at the same moment, the kick is recorded as missed. Until the 2026/27 amendments there was an automatic caution for the kicker in that situation; that automatic caution has been removed, so a simultaneous offence now costs the kick without the card.

The double touch has its own clarification, added because the old wording could not sensibly handle an accident. A kicker may not deliberately play the ball a second time before it has been touched by another player. If, though, he accidentally strikes it with both feet at once, or the ball touches his non-kicking foot or leg immediately after the kick, the outcome depends on where the ball ends up. If it goes in, the kick is retaken. If it does not, the kick is recorded as missed. That is a deliberate compromise: the accident cancels a goal but does not gift one.

Where a competition operates video assistance, the 2025/26 Laws moved the monitoring of goalkeeper encroachment at a penalty kick to the video assistant referee, with the assistant referee holding a position on the touchline in line with the penalty mark. Which parts of that protocol apply during a shoot-out is a competition matter rather than a matter for the Laws, and it varies. The mechanics of that decision-making sit alongside everything else in how video review is actually operated.

When a shoot-out ends, including the kicks that never get taken

A shoot-out does not always reach ten kicks, and the rule that stops it early is arithmetic rather than convention.

If, at any point before both teams have taken five, one team cannot possibly match the other's score even if it scored with all its remaining kicks, no more kicks are taken. A side leading by three with two kicks left for each is not made to complete the round. This is why shoot-outs end at four kicks to two, or three to one, and why the scoreline occasionally looks incomplete.

If both teams have taken five and the totals are level, the shoot-out moves to sudden death. Each team takes one more kick per round, in the same order of kicking first and second, and the shoot-out ends the moment one side scores from its kick and the other misses from the equivalent kick. A team that scores in a sudden-death round has not won; it has only won if the other side then fails.

The order of takers may be changed for the second round and afterwards. What may not change is the requirement that every eligible player takes a kick before any player takes a second. A goalkeeper is an eligible player for this purpose, which is how goalkeepers end up taking kicks in long shoot-outs, and why a side with eleven eligible players cannot simply hand its two best takers five attempts each.

1. 1The match ends levelExtra time, where the competition uses it, has been played and the tie is still level. Eligibility for the kicks is fixed at this moment: whoever is on the pitch, plus anyone temporarily off it with permission, is on the list.
2. 2The referee tosses for the goalThe first toss decides which goal the kicks are taken at. That end can be changed afterwards only for safety, or if the goal or the surface there has become unusable.
3. 3The referee tosses for orderThe team that wins the second toss chooses whether to kick first or second. This is the only decision either captain makes before the kicking starts.
4. 4Numbers are equalisedIf one side has more eligible players than the other, it reduces to match, and names the excluded players to the referee. Those players take no part.
5. 5Everyone takes positionKicker at the mark, defending goalkeeper on the line, the kicking side's goalkeeper outside the penalty area on the goal line, everybody else inside the centre circle.
6. 6The first round of five beginsThe teams kick alternately. Each side works out its own order privately and does not have to tell the referee. Kicks are recorded as scored or missed as they are taken.
7. 7The referee checks whether it is overAfter every kick, if one team cannot catch the other even by scoring all its remaining attempts, the shoot-out stops there. This is why some shoot-outs end before ten kicks have been taken.
8. 8Five each, still levelThe shoot-out goes to sudden death. Teams keep the same first and second order and take one kick each per round.
9. 9Sudden death runsA round only settles it if one team scores and the other does not. Every eligible player, goalkeepers included, must take a kick before anyone takes a second.
10. 10A round splitsOne kick is scored and the other is not, and the shoot-out ends immediately. The result is recorded separately from the match score, which stands as a draw.

The sequence set out in Law 10, with the decision points a referee works through. Competition rules decide whether extra time is played before this begins.

Injuries, dismissals and the rule about seven players

Things go wrong during shoot-outs, and Law 10 anticipates most of them.

Players, substitutes and team officials can all be cautioned or sent off during the kicks. If an outfield player is sent off, he is not replaced and his team simply has one fewer eligible kicker; if that leaves the sides uneven, the effect is felt in later rounds rather than corrected immediately. If a goalkeeper is sent off, he must be replaced by an eligible player, because a team cannot take kicks without somebody in goal.

The requirement that a match be abandoned if a team falls below seven players does not apply here. A shoot-out with a team down to six eligible players continues, which follows from the kicks not being part of the match.

An injury during the kicks is not a route to a substitution for an outfield player. Only the goalkeeper may be replaced, and only under the conditions above. A player who is injured and cannot take his turn does not get a substitute; his team is one taker short.

There is also a rule about delay. A player who is not present when his turn arrives does not hold the shoot-out up indefinitely, and the referee treats the absence as a forfeited kick. In practice this almost never happens, because the centre circle is a short walk from the penalty mark and referees manage the queue.

The ABBA experiment and why football walked away from it

The order of kicking has been under academic attack for years, on the grounds that going second means kicking under scoreboard pressure every single time. The proposed fix borrowed the sequence used in a tennis tie-break, where the serve alternates in pairs rather than singly, so that neither player faces the same disadvantage twice running.

Applied to football, that gives ABBA. Team A takes one, team B takes two, team A takes two, and so on, so the side kicking second in one pair kicks first in the next. The IFAB approved trials from 2017, and the format was used at youth international tournaments and in several English cup competitions.

The trial data, compiled by the economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, whose earlier published work put the first-kicking side's win rate close to sixty per cent under the conventional order, covered thirty-six ABBA shoot-outs. The teams kicking first and second won eighteen each.

The IFAB stopped the trials anyway, in 2018, citing a lack of strong support and the confusion the sequence caused for players, officials and spectators. That is a judgement about comprehensibility rather than about fairness, and it is a recurring one in the Laws: a rule that measurably improves an outcome can still be rejected for being hard to follow from the stands.

Team kicking first in the sequence18

Team kicking second in the sequence18

Thirty-six shoot-outs from the 2017 onwards ABBA trials in FIFA competitions and English and Dutch cup ties, as compiled by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta and reported by City AM. A single reported sample, not a settled result.

Show the numbers

Reported win split in the ABBA trial shoot-outs

Item	Value
Team kicking first in the sequence	18
Team kicking second in the sequence	18

Where competitions write their own version

Law 10 sets the procedure for the kicks. It does not decide when a competition reaches them, and that is where the variation lives.

Extra time is optional. The FA Community Shield goes straight to penalties if the sides are level after ninety minutes, and the EFL Cup removed extra time from its earlier rounds from the 2018/19 season on the grounds of player workload. Other knockout competitions play the full thirty minutes first. A supporter watching two English cup competitions in the same week can reasonably see two different answers to the same scoreline.

Away goals is still listed in Law 10 as a permitted method, but the competitions that made it famous have moved on. UEFA abolished the away goals rule across its club competitions from 2021/22, so a two-legged tie level on aggregate now goes to extra time and then to penalties regardless of where the goals were scored. The structure of those ties, and the seeding that produces them, sits in how the Champions League league phase and knockout rounds are organised.

Qualifying competitions differ again, because many of them resolve ties on aggregate over two legs and use penalties only in single-match play-offs. The route a national team takes through World Cup qualifying determines whether it ever faces a shoot-out at all.

Substitution allowances feed into this too, and they are competition rules rather than Law 10. Where a competition grants an additional substitution for extra time, a coach reaches the shoot-out with a different set of eligible kickers than he would have had otherwise, and the depth of the list at the fifth kick can turn on a regulation written years earlier for player-welfare reasons. The same applies to the size of the bench, since an unused substitute is the only person who can enter the field once the kicks have started, and then only in goal.

Some knockout structures avoid the question altogether by replaying drawn ties, and a few still do. Others use a shoot-out only at a particular stage, so an earlier round is settled by aggregate score and a later one by kicks. The pattern is that the further a competition gets from a fixture calendar with room in it, the more likely it is to reach the penalty mark quickly, and player workload rather than sporting principle has driven most of the recent movement in that direction.

Domestic play-offs, promotion deciders and cup finals each set their own conditions, which is why it is always worth checking the competition regulations rather than assuming. The kicks themselves will follow Law 10. Whether you get to them, and after how much football, is somebody else's decision.

The list of takers, and what a coach is actually choosing

Because the order is private and the Laws impose only one constraint on it, the selection of takers is the last piece of coaching in a knockout tie, and it is done under conditions that make it hard.

The constraint is the one already described: every eligible player kicks before anyone kicks twice. Within the first five, though, a coach is free to arrange his takers in any sequence he likes, and the sequence is not a ranking of ability. The first kick is taken with the scoreboard blank and is the least loaded of the five. The fifth is the one most likely to be taken with the tie hanging on it, which is why coaches often place a taker there for temperament rather than for technique.

The complication is that the coach cannot know how many of his five will actually be needed. If the opposition misses twice early, the fourth and fifth kicks may never happen, and the taker held back for the decisive moment goes home without touching the ball. The list therefore has to be robust to being truncated at any point, which is a different problem from ranking five players by how well they strike a ball.

Then there is who is available. Eligibility froze at the final whistle, so a coach who used his substitutions to see out extra time has already decided part of his list without meaning to. A manager who withdrew a specialist taker on seventy minutes has removed him from the shoot-out as surely as if he had been sent off. This is one of the quiet costs of late defensive substitutions, and it is paid ten minutes after the decision looks like it worked.

The goalkeeper is a taker too, and in a long sudden-death sequence he will reach the front of the queue. Some sides plan for that and some discover it. Either way it is worth remembering that the eleventh kick of a round-robin is not a stunt; it is the rule working as written.

What the Laws say, against what everyone in the ground believes

A handful of confident beliefs about shoot-outs are contradicted by the text, and they surface every time a tie goes to kicks.

Ends are not swapped. The goal is fixed by the first coin toss and stays fixed, whatever the crowd behind it is doing. Only safety or an unusable surface changes it.

The goalkeeper is not frozen. He may move along his line and lift a foot, and he only offends if no part of either foot is touching, in line with or behind the line at the instant of the kick. A keeper who is visibly moving is not necessarily encroaching.

A booked player is not one offence from dismissal. Cautions from the match do not travel into the kicks, so a player who spent extra time on a yellow card starts the shoot-out on nothing.

A substitute cannot be brought on to take a kick. The only entry permitted after the whistle is an unused substitute replacing a goalkeeper who cannot continue, and only if the team has substitutions left.

The referee is not told the order. Neither team has to declare its list, and there is no obligation to stick to a submitted sequence, because no sequence was ever submitted.

And the goals are not goals. A shoot-out is not part of the match, the result stands as a draw in the record, and the kicks decide only which side goes through.

How the shoot-out got into the Laws in the first place

Drawn knockout ties used to be settled by replays, by the drawing of lots, or by a coin toss, and the shortcomings of each are obvious enough that the sport spent decades looking for something better. The IFAB adopted the penalty shoot-out in 1970.

It took time to reach the biggest stage. The first shoot-out at a World Cup came in 1982, in the semi-final between West Germany and France, and the first World Cup final decided by kicks was in 1994, between Brazil and Italy. Between those two dates the procedure went from a novelty to the expected ending of any knockout tie, which is roughly how long it takes a sport to absorb a change of this size.

The design has been stable since, and the amendments have been narrow. Goalkeeper positioning was loosened to the current one-foot wording. Encroachment moved from an automatic retake to a warning-then-caution structure. The double touch acquired its accident clause. None of these alters the shape of the procedure; all of them close a gap that referees had been asked to fill with judgement.

What to watch from the moment the whistle goes

Watch the second coin toss and see which captain gets the choice, because that is the only tactical decision either side makes.

Count the players walking to the centre circle. If one team is short, look for the announcement of an excluded player from the other, because the reduce-to-equate rule will have been applied and somebody has just been told he is not kicking.

Look at which players are missing from the walk to the circle, since anyone substituted earlier is now a spectator and the bench cannot help. Watch the goalkeeper's feet rather than his body at the moment of the strike. He is entitled to a foot in front of the line. What he is not entitled to is both of them, and the difference is a retake if the kick is missed and nothing at all if it goes in.

Keep a running note of whether the shoot-out can still be lost. The moment one side cannot be caught, the kicks stop, and the crowd is usually a beat behind the referee in working that out.

And once it goes past five each, remember that everybody kicks before anybody kicks twice. The goalkeeper walking towards the spot in the ninth round is not a gesture of confidence. He is next on the list.

There is more on how the Laws work in practice across our football coverage, including the offside law, handball and video review, and the wider archive of explainers works through the competition regulations that decide when a tie reaches the penalty mark at all.