Extra Time and Penalties Rules in English Cup Ties

Ninety minutes gone at a fourth-round tie and the away end starts doing the sums. Two more halves, fifteen minutes each, and if that settles nothing then twenty-two men walk to one end of the ground and a shoot-out begins. Almost every English supporter has stood through that sequence. Far fewer could say what the referee is required to do between the final whistle and the first kick, which is a shame, because the procedure is tightly written and most of the arguments in the stand are about things the Laws already answer.

This page covers the rules as they apply in English knockout football — the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Football League Trophy, the FA Trophy, the play-off finals — and the parts of them that come from The Football Association and the EFL rather than from the Laws of the Game. The Laws are written by the International Football Association Board and govern how a shoot-out is conducted. Whether a particular tie reaches one at all is a matter for the competition's own rules, and those have changed a great deal more often than the Laws have.

When a tie goes to extra time and when it goes straight to kicks

The Laws of the Game do not require extra time. Law 7 permits it as one of the methods a competition may use to determine a winner, alongside a replayed match and kicks from the penalty mark, and leaves the choice to the organisers. That single sentence explains why two English cup ties finishing level at 90 minutes can end in completely different ways on the same night.

The FA Cup used replays for most of its life. A drawn tie meant a second match at the other club's ground, and if that finished level too there were, in the deep past, second and third replays until somebody won. The competition has cut replays back in stages, most sharply in the mid-2020s, when the FA removed them from the first round proper onwards as part of a wider rescheduling of the calendar. In the rounds where a replay no longer exists, a level tie is settled on the day with extra time and then kicks. The qualifying rounds have kept replays longer than the proper rounds, because for a non-League club a second match is a second gate and the money matters more than the fixture congestion does. If you want the sequence of how that was unwound round by round, how FA Cup replays work sets it out.

The League Cup went the other way and went further. Extra time was stripped out of the competition entirely except for the final, so a tie level after ninety minutes goes directly to kicks from the penalty mark. The reasoning was fixture load — the competition sits inside a congested midweek calendar and adding half an hour to a third-round tie in September has a cost that shows up in April. The Carabao Cup format explains how the rounds and the seeding work around that decision.

The Community Shield has used the same approach for years: level at full time and the sides go straight to the spot, with no extra time at all. Nobody complains much, because it is a curtain-raiser and everybody wants to be on the coach. The Community Shield has a few other quirks beyond that one.

The play-off finals are the opposite case. Those are single matches worth an enormous amount, and they get the full sequence — thirty minutes of extra time, then kicks. A promotion decided by a shoot-out at Wembley is the sharpest version of the format English football has, and it has happened more than once.

The one rule that never changes

Whatever a competition decides about extra time, once a shoot-out begins it is conducted identically in the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Vase and a Sunday morning county cup tie. Law 10 does not have a lower-division variant.

The two periods, the change of ends and the minute in between

Extra time is two periods of fifteen minutes. Not one period of thirty with a stoppage in it; two distinct periods, with a change of ends between them and no interval other than a brief drinks break. The teams change ends because fifteen minutes of a strong wind at one end of a ground is a material advantage, and the Laws have never been willing to hand that to whichever side happened to be attacking that way at the whistle.

Between the end of normal time and the start of extra time the players are entitled to a short break. It is capped at one minute and it happens on the pitch — the teams do not go back down the tunnel. Managers use it for the last instructions of the night, which is why you see the huddles on the halfway line while the referee stands nearby with an eye on his watch. The same one-minute allowance applies at half-time in extra time, and again the teams stay on the field.

• 2Periods
• 15Minutes per period
• 1Maximum break before extra time in minutes
• 1Additional substitutions allowed

Values set by Law 7 of the Laws of the Game. The additional substitution is permitted rather than required, and applies only where a competition has adopted it.

Stoppage time is added to each period of extra time exactly as it is to a half of normal time, and on the same grounds — substitutions, treatment of injuries, disciplinary stoppages, goal celebrations, any check by the video assistant referee where the competition uses one. A fifteen-minute period that runs to nineteen is not the referee being generous. Stoppage time rules work the same way in extra time as at any other point in a match.

One consequence gets missed. A player cautioned in the first half of normal time and cautioned again in extra time is sent off in the ordinary way, and his side plays the rest of extra time and the shoot-out a man down. The shoot-out then has to be equalised, which is covered further down and which has decided ties.

The extra substitution, and the extra window

Where a competition permits it — and the English cup competitions generally do — a team that has used all its substitutions during normal time may make one more once extra time starts. That is the headline. The detail that matters more to a manager is the window.

Substitutions in modern football are limited twice over: by the number of players you may change, and by the number of stoppages in which you may change them. A side is allowed a set number of opportunities to make its changes, and bringing on two players at once uses one of them. Half-time does not count against that allowance, which is why so many changes happen there. Extra time brings both a further substitution and a further window, and neither the interval before extra time nor the interval at half-time in extra time counts either.

So a manager arriving at 90 minutes with nothing left in the bank has, in practice, two clean opportunities to change the shape of the game without spending anything: the break before extra time, and the break at half-time in extra time. A manager who has held a substitution back has three. That asymmetry is why you will see a bench keep a player in reserve through a tight second half in a cup tie when they would have used him by the hour mark in a league match. Premier League substitution rules set out the league version of the same framework, which the cups largely mirror.

The extra change is often a goalkeeper. Not a like-for-like replacement of an injured one, but a deliberate specialist brought on at the end of extra time for the shoot-out. The Laws permit it and it is entirely legitimate. It also carries a risk that the substituted goalkeeper spends the rest of his career hearing about, because a keeper who has not touched the ball has no feel for the surface, the light or the flight, and there have been nights when the specialist has been beaten five times.

Concussion substitutes

English competitions have run permanent concussion substitute protocols under IFAB approval, and those replacements sit outside the normal count. A player removed under the head-injury protocol may be replaced without using a standard substitution or a window, and the opposing side is granted a matching additional change so the protocol confers no competitive advantage. The rule exists because the alternative — a manager weighing a head injury against his remaining changes — is not a decision anybody should be asked to make.

How kicks from the penalty mark are organised under Law 10

Law 10 is titled "Determining the Outcome of a Match", and the shoot-out section of it is one of the most procedural passages in the Laws. Nothing about it is left to convention.

The kicks are taken at one goal. All of them, both teams. Each is taken from the penalty mark by a different player, alternately, and the ball is in play only until the kick is complete — there are no rebounds, so a shot that comes back off the post and is turned in by the kicker is not a goal. It is a miss. That is the single largest difference between a kick from the penalty mark and a penalty kick awarded during play, and it catches supporters out every season.

Every player except the kicker and the two goalkeepers must be inside the centre circle. The goalkeeper of the kicking team stands on the field of play outside the penalty area, on the goal line where it meets the penalty area boundary — a specific spot, not a general instruction to stay out of the way. The referee, the assistant referees and the fourth official have fixed positions too: one assistant on the goal line to judge whether the ball has crossed it, the referee at the edge of the penalty area, the other assistant watching the centre circle.

The order of kickers is not submitted to the referee in advance. English competitions do not require a written list, and a captain may change his mind between the fourth kick and the fifth — and frequently does, once he has seen what the previous four looked like. What cannot change is the alternation. Team A, team B, team A, and so on, from the first kick to the last.

Reduce to equalise, and who is eligible to take a kick

Before the first kick, both teams must have the same number of eligible players. If one side finished extra time with eleven and the other with ten, the side with eleven must reduce to ten and tell the referee which player is being excluded. That player takes no part in the shoot-out.

It is a strange rule the first time you meet it. It is also the right one. A shoot-out is not a contest between teams on the pitch; it is a contest between two pools of takers. A side that had a man sent off in the 70th minute would otherwise be handed a compensating advantage in the shoot-out, because it would run out of takers less quickly than its opponent. Equalising removes that.

Only players who were on the field of play at the end of the match may take a kick. That includes a player temporarily off receiving treatment, provided he returns. It excludes anybody who has been substituted, anybody sent off, and anybody excluded to equalise the numbers. A named substitute who never came on cannot take a kick, however good he is from twelve yards — with one exception.

The exception is the goalkeeper. If the goalkeeper is injured during the shoot-out itself and cannot continue, and his team has not used all its permitted substitutions, he may be replaced by a named substitute, and that substitute may then take a kick. It is a narrow provision, and it is there because a shoot-out in which an injured goalkeeper has to stand in his own goal because nobody else is permitted to go there would be an absurdity.

Situation at the final whistle	What Law 10 requires
One side has more players than the other	The larger side reduces to match, and names the excluded player to the referee
A player is off the field being treated	He may return and take a kick
A player was substituted in normal or extra time	He is not eligible
A player was sent off	He is not eligible and his side is not compensated
The goalkeeper is injured during the shoot-out	A named substitute may replace him if a change remains

Choosing the end, and choosing who kicks first

The referee tosses a coin to decide which goal the kicks will be taken at. That is the first decision and it belongs to the referee alone. The Laws allow him to move the kicks to the other end if the ground, the goal or the pitch surface there is unsuitable, or if there is a safety or lighting reason — a floodlight failure at one end, a badly cut-up goalmouth, a segregation problem behind one goal. It is not a decision the captains may contest.

Then there is a second toss, and this one the captains care about. The team whose captain wins it decides whether to take the first kick or the second. Note the wording: they choose the order, not the end. Under an earlier version of the Law the winner of the toss simply kicked first, which removed a decision that some captains want to make.

1. 1Numbers equalisedThe side with more players on the field reduces to match the other and names the excluded player to the referee.
2. 2End decidedThe referee tosses a coin to choose the goal, unless pitch condition, floodlights or crowd safety rule one end out.
3. 3Order decidedA second toss. The winning captain chooses whether his side kicks first or second.
4. 4Positions takenAll players except the kicker and the two goalkeepers go to the centre circle. The kicking side's goalkeeper stands on the goal line at the edge of the penalty area.
5. 5Officials positionedAn assistant referee takes the goal line, the referee stands at the edge of the penalty area, the other assistant watches the centre circle.
6. 6Kicks takenFive per side, alternately, each by a different player, with no rebound in play once the kick is complete.

The sequence set out in Law 10 of the Laws of the Game. It applies identically in every English knockout competition, from the FA Cup final down to a county cup tie.

Almost every captain chooses to kick first, and the reason traces back to a piece of research that has had more influence on the Laws than any other study of penalties. The economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta examined a large sample of shoot-outs and found that the team kicking first won appreciably more often than half the time, attributing it to the pressure carried by the side always kicking to stay alive. That finding drove the ABBA trial described below. It has since been tested against larger and differently constructed samples, and the effect has proved smaller and less stable than the original figure suggested. Taking the ball first is probably still the sensible call on the balance of the evidence. Anyone who tells you the toss decides the tie is overstating it considerably.

Sudden death, and running out of takers

Five kicks each. If one team cannot be caught before both have taken five — three scored against none, with two to come — the referee stops it there. The Laws call this sudden termination, and it is why a shoot-out can end 3-0 after seven kicks rather than the ten a supporter is expecting.

If the sides are level after five each, the shoot-out goes to sudden death. One kick per team, in turn, and it ends the moment one side has scored more than the other from an equal number of kicks. The constraint that matters is that every eligible player must take a kick before anyone takes a second. That is what produces the very long shoot-outs: at kick eleven you are into a team's sixth-choice taker, at kick twenty you are through the whole side, and then the goalkeepers walk up.

The goalkeepers taking kicks is not a novelty or a gesture. It is the Laws working exactly as written. Once both keepers have taken one, the cycle begins again with the players who took the first five, and it can run a very long way.

One more provision, easy to miss and occasionally decisive. If a player is sent off during the shoot-out — for dissent, for a second caution, for an offence against an opponent in the centre circle — the numbers must be equalised again. His side does not simply carry on with a taker fewer in the rotation while the opposition keeps eleven. The other team must reduce by one before the next kick. Same principle as before the shoot-out started, applied mid-sequence.

Goalkeeper rules, encroachment and the retake matrix

For years the goalkeeper rule was written in a way that no goalkeeper obeyed and few referees enforced: both feet on the line at the moment of the kick, in a sport where every keeper alive took a step. The Laws were rewritten to something enforceable. At the moment the ball is kicked, the goalkeeper must have at least part of one foot touching, in line with, or behind the goal line. He may not stand behind the line, and he may not touch the goalposts, the crossbar or the net.

What happens when he goes early depends entirely on the outcome of the kick, and the same logic runs through all the encroachment provisions. The principle is that a team should never gain from its own offence and should never be punished twice for the other side's.

Offence	Kick scored	Kick missed or saved
Goalkeeper off his line early	Goal stands	Retaken, and the goalkeeper is warned; a repeat brings a caution
A team-mate of the kicker encroaches	Retaken	No retake, the kick is recorded as missed
A team-mate of the goalkeeper encroaches	Goal stands	Retaken
Players from both sides encroach	Retaken	Retaken
The kicker feints illegally after completing his run-up	Disallowed, recorded as missed, kicker cautioned	Recorded as missed, kicker cautioned

The feinting rule deserves a note because it is the one most often misdescribed in commentary. A stutter in the run-up is legal and always has been. What is not legal is feinting to kick once the run-up has been completed — the moment where the kicker stops dead at the ball to draw the goalkeeper's dive. That is an offence by the kicker and it is recorded as a miss whether the ball ends up in the net or not.

The goalkeeper who saves and then celebrates towards the opposing supporters is a different question, handled under the ordinary disciplinary provisions, and referees at English grounds have not always been consistent about where the line falls between exuberance and provocation in front of a packed away end. Where a competition uses video review, its role in a shoot-out is narrow. How VAR works covers the categories it may intervene on, and a shoot-out kick falls inside them only in limited circumstances.

ABBA, and the other formats English football has trialled

The order in a conventional shoot-out is ABABABABAB. Team A kicks, then team B, ten times over. The complaint is structural: if A goes first and scores every time, B is always kicking to survive, and the asymmetry accumulates over the five rounds.

ABBA was the proposed fix, borrowed straight from the tennis tie-break. A kicks, then B kicks twice, then A twice, and so on, so that neither side takes two consecutive kicks under the same kind of pressure. IFAB authorised trials of it in the late 2010s and English football was one of the main testing grounds — the League Cup used it, and so did the Community Shield, alongside trials at a handful of FIFA and UEFA youth tournaments.

It did not survive. IFAB reviewed the trials and decided against adopting the format, and the reasons given were as much about comprehension as about fairness. Players did not reliably know when they were up. Supporters in the ground could not follow the sequence without checking. Referees had another thing to track in a moment that already has plenty in it. Against all that, the statistical case for the fix had weakened as more data came in, so the Board was being asked to accept real confusion in exchange for a benefit it could no longer be confident of. It declined.

Two other variants have circulated without reaching an English competition. One is the shoot-out where the kicker starts from the halfway line and dribbles at the goalkeeper against a clock, which the North American leagues used in the 1970s and 1980s and which produces a better spectacle and a worse test. The other is the proposal that the shoot-out should be taken before kick-off and held in reserve as the tiebreaker, so the trailing side is chasing a known target rather than a lottery. No governing body has ever entertained it seriously.

The Football League Trophy has been the most willing English competition to experiment with format generally, including going straight to kicks in the group stage to decide a bonus point. The EFL Trophy has carried more rule variations than any other senior English knockout competition.

The longest shoot-outs English football has recorded

The League Cup produced the most famous long one at a senior English ground. Liverpool and Middlesbrough at Anfield in September 2014, a third-round tie that reached 14-13 after thirty kicks. Both goalkeepers took one. Both scored.

The record for the competition that started all this belongs a long way down the pyramid. In an FA Cup first qualifying round replay in 2005, Tunbridge Wells and Littlehampton Town went to forty kicks before Tunbridge Wells won 16-15, a figure widely recorded as the longest shoot-out in the history of the FA Cup — though non-League record-keeping from that era is not always complete, and any "longest ever" claim in this corner of the game is worth treating with some caution.

Tunbridge Wells v Littlehampton Town, FA Cup qualifying 200540kicks

Liverpool v Middlesbrough, League Cup 201430kicks

Charlton Athletic v Sunderland, play-off final 199814kicks

Total kicks taken by both sides combined in three individually documented matches. Not a ranking of every long shoot-out in English football, and non-League records from earlier decades are incomplete.

Show the numbers

Kicks taken in three long English shoot-outs

Item	Value
Tunbridge Wells v Littlehampton Town, FA Cup qualifying 2005	40kicks
Liverpool v Middlesbrough, League Cup 2014	30kicks
Charlton Athletic v Sunderland, play-off final 1998	14kicks

The 1998 First Division play-off final is in that chart for a different reason. Fourteen kicks is nothing by the standards of the other two, but it followed a 4-4 draw and it decided promotion to the Premier League, and the value of the kick that settled it bears no comparison to anything in a third-round tie. The play-off final at Wembley is the most expensive single match in English football by that measure, and a shoot-out is a live possibility in every one of them.

England's national side has its own long relationship with the format, well enough documented to have a page to itself. England's penalty shoot-out history covers the tournament record and the coaching response that followed it.

What clubs actually do to prepare

The line that you cannot practise penalties because you cannot recreate the pressure was received wisdom in English football for a long time. It is now more or less dead. The research that killed it came largely from Geir Jordet, whose work at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences analysed shoot-out footage frame by frame and found consistent, measurable differences between kickers who scored and kickers who did not — differences with nothing to do with technique.

The findings that changed behaviour were about time and gaze. Players who took longer between the referee's whistle and their run-up scored more often than those who hurried. Players who turned their back on the goalkeeper while placing the ball, or who looked away from him, scored less often. Players who had just come on, or who were carrying the weight of an earlier miss, showed avoidance behaviours visible on video before the kick was struck. None of that is about the ability to hit a corner from twelve yards, which every professional has.

So the preparation has shifted. Clubs now rehearse the walk rather than only the strike — the length of it, the routine at the ball, the decision made before leaving the halfway line rather than during the run-up. Goalkeepers arrive at a shoot-out with dossiers, and the notes taped inside a sock or a water bottle are a genuine analytical product rather than theatre, built from every kick a player has taken on camera. Ben Lyttleton's book on the subject gathered a good deal of this together for a general readership and helped move the English conversation on from fatalism.

The order gets prepared too. The old habit of putting the strongest taker fifth assumes the shoot-out reaches a fifth kick, which a substantial share of them do not. There is a reasonable argument, and some clubs act on it, that the most reliable taker should go first and the fifth slot should belong to the player least troubled by consequence.

Why "a lottery" is the wrong word

Managers reach for it every time. It is a lottery, nobody deserves to lose like that, over the two legs we were the better side. All understandable in a tunnel five minutes after the event, and all wrong.

A lottery has no skill component. A shoot-out has several, and they are measurable: the conversion rate of professional takers is high but far from uniform, goalkeepers differ meaningfully in their save rates, and the behavioural markers described above predict outcomes at a rate random variation does not. A team that has thought about its order, prepared its goalkeeper and rehearsed the walk is doing something that a team which has not is not doing. That is the definition of a contest with skill in it.

What is true, and what the managers are really complaining about, is that a shoot-out measures a very narrow band of football ability, and one with almost nothing to do with the two hours preceding it. A side can dominate possession, territory and chances for 120 minutes and lose, and that feels unjust because in ordinary play those things predict the result. The honest position is that a shoot-out is a fair test of the wrong thing. That is a different complaint from the one usually made, and a better one.

There is no obvious replacement. Replays cost fixtures, and in a season already running to the edge of what players can absorb the calendar has run out of room, which is why the FA has been cutting them rather than restoring them. Golden goal and silver goal were both tried internationally and both abandoned, having made teams more cautious rather than less. Deciding a tie on corners or bookings rewards accountancy. Deciding it on away goals produced two decades of second legs played to a formula, and UEFA eventually dropped it for exactly that reason.

So it stays. For all the complaining, the shoot-out has one property that nothing else on the list has: it produces a winner, on the night, in front of the people who paid to be there, in about ten minutes. English football has gone looking for something better several times and has not found it. The rest of the domestic knockout structure, from the qualifying rounds to Wembley, runs through the football section and the wider England guides — including the history of the FA Cup, where the earliest ties were settled by replay after replay until one side could not afford to travel again.