How FA Cup Replays Work and Why They Were Cut Back

Edgar Street, on a Saturday afternoon in February 1972, with the fourth round already under way elsewhere. Hereford United, a Southern League club, were losing 1-0 to Newcastle United in a third-round replay that the weather had pushed back week after week. Ronnie Radford hit a shot from thirty-odd yards, the pitch invasion that followed became the most repeated piece of film in English football, and Ricky George won the tie in extra time. None of it happens without a rule the Football Association deleted from the rounds proper more than fifty years later.

The rule was simple. A drawn tie in the FA Cup was played again, at the other club's ground, and the winner of the second match went through. It shaped the competition's finances, its calendar and a good part of its folklore. Since the 2024-25 season it applies only in the qualifying rounds, and understanding what changed means understanding what a replay actually was in the FA's rules rather than in the montage.

The replay as the FA wrote it, not as television remembers it

The FA Challenge Cup Competition Rules never treated a replay as an event. It was the ordinary consequence of a drawn tie, handled in a couple of clauses. If the scores were level at the end of normal time in the first match, the tie was played again. No extra time in the original fixture. No shoot-out. The referee blew up, both sets of players walked off, and the draw for the next round was made with the tie listed as "winners of".

Venue was decided by the draw, not by choice. The club drawn second — the away club in the first match — hosted the replay. That single clause did more for small clubs than any prize-money schedule, because it meant a non-league side pulled out first against a top-flight club got two bites: a share of a large away gate, then a full house of its own.

The replay had to be played inside a window the FA set rather than on a date the clubs picked at leisure, which is why replays landed on Tuesday and Wednesday nights a week or so after the original tie. Weather could push them further, as Hereford's was pushed, but the rules pressed for a quick turnaround because everything behind the tie in the calendar depended on it.

One more clause matters. Once second replays were abolished, the replay itself carried extra time and, if needed, kicks from the penalty mark under the Laws of the Game. So a tie could still run to 210 minutes across two matches before anyone took a penalty. How those final minutes work is covered in our guide to extra time and penalties in domestic cup ties.

The draw order was a financial document

Supporters read a draw for the fixture. Club secretaries read it for the venue of the second match, because that is where the ceiling on the tie's value was set. Drawn at home to a Premier League club, a National League side knew that a draw sent it to a stadium of fifty or sixty thousand for a share of that gate. Drawn away first, the same club knew a draw brought the big name back to its own ground on a midweek night with television likely to follow.

Neither outcome was better in every case. A share of a huge gate is a bigger cheque; a home replay is a smaller gate but the whole of the catering, the bars, the programmes and the hospitality, none of which is divided the same way. Which one a club preferred usually came down to the size of its ground and the state of its balance sheet.

Which rounds keep a replay and which no longer do

Replays did not disappear in one announcement. They were removed stage by stage across roughly a quarter of a century, always from the top of the competition downwards, and always for the same underlying reason.

Stage	Replay status
Qualifying competition, extra preliminary to fourth qualifying	Retained
First round proper to fourth round	Removed from 2024-25
Fifth round	Removed from 2019-20
Sixth round, the quarter-final	Removed from 2016-17
Semi-final	Removed from 1999-2000
Final	Last replay 1993; shoot-out available from 1999

Read the order twice. Every removal took the replay away from a round in which the clubs involved were, on the whole, the ones with European commitments and congested league programmes. The rounds that kept it longest were the rounds full of clubs with nothing else in the diary and a serious need for the gate money.

1. 1Ninety minutesThe first match ends level. No extra time is played and no shoot-out is taken.
2. 2Venue set by the drawThe replay goes to the ground of the club drawn second in the original tie. Neither club chooses.
3. 3Replay inside a windowThe FA set a period rather than a date, which is why replays fell on midweek evenings.
4. 4Extra timeIf the replay is level after ninety minutes, two periods of fifteen minutes are played.
5. 5Kicks from the penalty markStill level, and the tie is settled from the spot under the Laws of the Game.

The sequence set out in the FA's competition rules after second replays were abolished in 1991-92. It still applies in the qualifying rounds.

The 2024 decision and the reasons the FA gave for it

In the spring of 2024 the FA announced a restructure of the competition to run alongside a new six-year agreement with the Premier League. Replays would go from the first round proper onwards. Every round, including the fifth, would be played at a weekend. The winter break would be protected. The final would sit on a weekend of its own.

The FA's argument had two halves. The first was scheduling: the governing body said the competition could not keep midweek replays and also give every round a clear weekend slot in a season that had grown longer at both ends. The second was money, in the sense that the agreement attached to the format change was presented as a settlement that would push funding through the pyramid and into the grassroots game the FA is responsible for.

Both halves were contested, the second more than the first. A funding commitment that flows down through a governing body is not the same thing as a gate a club takes on the night, and the clubs that lost replays were not, in the main, the clubs that would notice a change in grassroots investment.

What is not in dispute is who made the decision. The FA owns the competition and writes its rules. The Premier League was party to the agreement. The EFL and the National League System clubs — the overwhelming majority of the entrants — were not at that table, and the format of the rounds proper was settled without them.

The rest of the restructure, which got less attention

Losing replays was the headline, but it was one clause among several. The fifth round, which had been moved to midweek in 2019-20 when the winter break was introduced, went back to a weekend. The competition committed to keeping the break intact rather than letting cup fixtures colonise it. And the final was given a weekend with no league programme around it, reversing years in which the showpiece had been squeezed between Premier League rounds and, in some seasons, played before the league campaign had even finished.

Two of those three changes were what most supporters had been asking for. That is the part of the argument the FA had on its side, and it is why the debate about the restructure has never been as one-sided as the debate about replays alone.

Fixture congestion and a European calendar that grew

The immediate pressure came from UEFA. From the 2024-25 season the Champions League moved from thirty-two clubs playing six group matches to thirty-six playing eight in a single league phase, with an additional knockout play-off round for the clubs finishing ninth to twenty-fourth. The Europa League was rebuilt on the same model. The Conference League took a comparable shape. For an English club going deep in Europe that is not one extra match but a block of them, arriving in exactly the midweeks a replay would have used.

FIFA pushed from the other direction with an expanded thirty-two-team Club World Cup in the summer, which eats the recovery window rather than the season itself but presses on the same calendar.

Domestically, England already asked more of its clubs than most European leagues do. Thirty-eight league matches in the top flight, forty-six in the EFL, two knockout competitions, and for some a European programme on top. The Carabao Cup had already answered that arithmetic by sending level ties straight to a shoot-out in most rounds rather than playing extra time — the detail is in our guide to the Carabao Cup format. The FA Cup was the last domestic competition still generating unscheduled matches at short notice.

There is an honest counter-argument, and it deserves stating. Only a minority of ties in any round finish level, so a replay round is not a second full fixture list; it is a handful of matches, most of them involving clubs with no European tie to protect. The competition could in principle have kept replays only in rounds where no Premier League club is involved. It did not, and the FA has not set out in public detail why the partial option was rejected rather than the whole thing.

What a replay was actually worth to a club outside the top flight

Prize money was never the point. FA Cup round prize money follows the result of the tie, and a replay does not change the amount that reaches the winner — the schedule of payments is covered in our guide to FA Cup prize money. What a replay produced was a second matchday out of a single tie, and matchday income at that level is the difference between a good year and a bad one.

Take the two directions the draw could send a small club.

Drawn at home first and holding out for a draw, the club then travelled to the big ground for the replay. Under the competition rules, gate receipts from the rounds proper are divided between the two clubs after match expenses and a levy to the competition pool. A share of a full Premier League stadium, on a night the home club has to sell to its own supporters, has funded stand roofs and training-ground purchases at clubs whose annual turnover is smaller than a single Saturday's takings at the ground they visited.

Drawn away first and coming back level, the club hosted. Smaller gate, but the whole of the home operation, plus a broadcast facility fee if the replay was selected — which for a club at that level could exceed everything else it earned from television across a season.

1. 1A second gateOne tie produced two matchdays, with receipts in the rounds proper shared between the clubs after expenses and a competition levy.
2. 2A second broadcast feeIf the replay was selected for live coverage, the facility fee was paid again for the same tie.
3. 3Full home operationBars, catering, programmes and hospitality at the replay venue, none of it divided the way the gate is.
4. 4Unchanged prize moneyThe round payment followed the result, not the number of matches, so a replay was additional income rather than a redistribution.

The revenue mechanisms attached to a replayed tie. No figures are given because they varied entirely with the ground, the crowd and the broadcast selection.

The broader picture of how English clubs below the Premier League actually earn money is set out in our guide to matchday revenue at English clubs.

How the EFL and non-league clubs responded

The response from below the Premier League was blunt and close to unanimous. The EFL's public statement made clear the decision had been reached without it, and clubs across the Football League and the National League System said much the same in their own words over the days that followed: the competition's format had been changed by an agreement between the two parties with the least to lose from it.

The objection was rarely nostalgic. It was structural. A League Two club budgets conservatively for cup income because it cannot count on the draw, but the possibility of a replay is what made a good draw genuinely transformative rather than merely useful. Remove it and the ceiling on what a cup run can deliver drops, while the costs of competing — squad depth, travel, medical cover, stewarding for a bigger crowd — do not move at all.

There was a second objection, about consultation itself. The FA is a governing body whose membership includes every affiliated club in England and the county associations beneath them. How it consults that membership on competition rules is a live question that runs a long way past replays, into the wider argument covered in our guide to the independent football regulator.

The FA's answer, in substance, was that the qualifying rounds retained replays, that money attached to the agreement would reach the pyramid, and that a competition unable to fit inside its own calendar helps nobody. Whether that satisfies a League Two chairman who has just watched a possible second gate disappear is a different question, and the clubs answered it themselves.

How a level tie is settled now

In the rounds proper, a tie level after ninety minutes goes to two periods of fifteen minutes. Goals in extra time count normally; there is no golden goal and no away-goals rule, neither of which the FA Cup used in any case. If extra time settles nothing, the tie goes to kicks from the penalty mark under Law 10 of the Laws of the Game — five kicks each, alternating, then sudden death, with only players on the pitch at the final whistle eligible to take one.

The ABBA sequence trialled in England in the late 2010s, including in FA Cup ties, was abandoned. The alternating ABAB order stands.

In the qualifying competition the older sequence survives untouched. A drawn tie is replayed at the ground of the club drawn away, and only if that second match is level does extra time and a shoot-out come into play. A Step 4 club and a Step 2 club can therefore still produce the full 210 minutes across two nights, while a Premier League club and a National League club meeting in the third round cannot.

That split is the thing to hold on to. Two versions of one competition now settle a draw two different ways, divided at the first round proper. It is not tidy, and the FA has not pretended otherwise.

What extra time does to a squad that a replay did not

The practical effect of the change lands on the bench. Law 3 lets a competition permit an additional substitute in extra time, along with an extra window in which to use them, and the domestic cups have taken that up. So a manager whose tie goes long now spends that extra player and thirty minutes of running on the same night, and then plays a league fixture at the weekend with a group of players who have already done 120 minutes.

Under the old rule the same tie cost 90 minutes now and 90 minutes later, with a training week in between and a full squad available for both. For a club with twenty professionals and no reserve goalkeeper on a full contract, that difference is not marginal. It is why several EFL managers argued the replay was, in fitness terms, the gentler option — an argument that runs directly against the congestion case, and one the FA's published reasoning does not engage with.

Replays that changed what the competition means

The 1970 final needed a second match, and it is the only one in the modern era not played at Wembley. Chelsea and Leeds United drew 2-2 on a Wembley pitch churned to sand by the Horse of the Year Show, and the replay went to Old Trafford, where Chelsea won 2-1 in extra time. It remains one of the most watched matches in British television history and the only final replay held away from the national stadium.

Villa Park, April 1999. Manchester United and Arsenal had drawn their semi-final and came back three days later. Peter Schmeichel saved a penalty in stoppage time, and in extra time Ryan Giggs ran from inside his own half and hit the ball into the roof of the net. That was the last FA Cup semi-final replay ever played. The rule went the following season.

Two years earlier, Chesterfield — a Second Division club — drew 3-3 with Middlesbrough in a semi-final at Old Trafford after leading by two goals, then lost the replay at Hillsborough. No club from outside the top two divisions has reached a final since, and Chesterfield's tie remains the closest anyone from that level has come in the modern game.

Then 1990. Manchester United and Crystal Palace drew 3-3 at Wembley in a final that swung four times. Alex Ferguson dropped his goalkeeper for the replay, put Les Sealey in, and won 1-0. Ferguson's first trophy at United came out of a match that could not exist under the current rules.

More of these are collected in our guide to FA Cup giant-killings.

Second replays and the ties that would not end

Before 1991-92 there was no upper limit that meant anything. A tie level after the replay was replayed again. And again. The rules allowed the clubs to agree a neutral ground once the sequence had run past the second match, which is how ties that began at two small grounds finished at league stadiums in front of crowds neither club had seen in years.

It reached the top of the competition too. In 1980, Arsenal and Liverpool needed four matches to settle a semi-final, the last three of them at neutral grounds, before Brian Talbot's goal at Highfield Road finally put Arsenal into a final they then lost. Four semi-final matches, in a spring in which Arsenal were also reaching a European final.

The extreme case belongs to the qualifying competition. In 1971, Alvechurch and Oxford City needed six matches to settle a fourth qualifying round tie — five replays after the original — before Alvechurch went through. Six matches, in October, to reach a round that itself only leads to the first round proper.

It made the calendar unmanageable in a way that is easy to underestimate now. A club stuck in a long tie could not fulfil league fixtures, which pushed those matches into the spring, which compressed the run-in, which generated its own backlog. Clubs playing two competitive matches a week in November with squads of sixteen professionals were not doing it by choice.

• 6Matches in the 1971 Alvechurch tie
• 6Finals replayed since 1970
• 1993Year of the last replayed final
• 2005Year the final was first settled on penalties

Dates and counts from the competition's own history. The finals figure counts replayed finals from 1970 onwards.

Second replays went in 1991-92, replaced by extra time and a shoot-out inside the first replay. That change ended the endless tie, and it drew far less protest than 2024 did — partly because nothing was lost financially, since the clubs still banked their two matches.

The final replay, and how it quietly disappeared

Six FA Cup finals were replayed from 1970 onwards, and five of those replays were at Wembley itself: Tottenham Hotspur against Manchester City in 1981, the match that produced Ricky Villa's second goal; Tottenham again in 1982, against Queens Park Rangers; Manchester United against Brighton in 1983, four days after Gordon Smith's chance in the last minute of extra time; United against Crystal Palace in 1990; and Arsenal against Sheffield Wednesday in 1993, settled by Andy Linighan's header in the last minute of extra time, between two clubs who had already met in the League Cup final that spring as well.

The 1993 replay was the last. From 1999 the rules provided for a shoot-out on the day, which is why the 2005 final between Arsenal and Manchester United — goalless after 120 minutes — was decided from the penalty spot rather than by a rematch the following Thursday.

Why the final's replay went first is worth stating plainly, because it is the same reason the rest followed. Wembley is booked. Broadcast schedules are fixed months ahead. Players go away with England. A replay is an event that cannot be scheduled until three hours before it becomes necessary, and everything else in the modern calendar is scheduled years in advance. The final was simply the first fixture where that collision became intolerable.

The traditions attached to the day itself, from the hymn to the walk up to the royal box, are covered in FA Cup final day.

Whether replays could ever come back

The format sits inside an agreement running six years from 2024-25. Reversing it before that agreement is renegotiated would need the FA and the Premier League to reopen a settlement both signed, and the pressure that produced it is not easing: UEFA's expanded competitions are in place for the medium term, and FIFA has added to the summer rather than subtracted from it.

The honest reading is that a full restoration is unlikely and a partial one is not. The competition already runs two rule sets, divided at the first round proper. Moving that dividing line up by a round or two — keeping replays in the first and second rounds, where no Premier League club is involved, and settling everything from the third round on the day — would answer most of the financial objection at almost no cost to the elite calendar. Nothing in the rules makes that difficult. It is a decision, not a technical problem.

What would make it likelier is evidence rather than sentiment. If the clubs that lost replays can show, across several seasons of accounts, what the loss actually did to them, that is a stronger case than any appeal to romance. Cup income is volatile by nature, which cuts both ways in that argument and is exactly why several seasons rather than one would be needed.

What supporters actually lost

Not the drama of a shoot-out, which the competition still has. What went was a specific kind of night: a Tuesday in November, a Step 2 ground with a capacity of four thousand and a temporary stand at one end, floodlights installed in the 1960s and looking it, and a Championship club that would much rather be somewhere else. The replay was the only fixture in English football that could not be planned for, and that was the whole of its value.

It also removed a second chance that ran in one direction. A small club that held out for ninety minutes earned the right to try again on its own terms. That is a materially different competition from one where holding out for ninety minutes earns thirty more minutes and then a shoot-out.

The romance argument is easy to overstate. Plenty of replays were flat, thinly attended midweek matches that both clubs resented and neither could afford to stage well. But the ones that were not are the ones the competition still sells itself on, and it is hard to argue that a governing body marketing the FA Cup on Hereford in 1972 and Giggs in 1999 has entirely reckoned with having abolished the format both of those matches were played in.

The qualifying rounds still have it. Every August, in front of a few hundred people at grounds most supporters have never heard of, ties finish level and are played again the following week at the other place. That is where the replay lives now, and our guide to the FA Cup qualifying rounds covers what that stage of the competition involves. For the shape of the whole competition either side of it, start with the FA Cup round structure, or with the wider football section and the rest of the England guides.