A crucial ruling by football’s European regulatory body has halted calls for a major amendment to the Laws of the Game.
To lessen the strain on players in the second half of the hectic football season, UEFA has been looking into changes to the Champions League and Europa League knockout stages.
There are more calls for the sport’s lawmakers to intervene on player welfare issues since elite players are expected to compete in high-intensity matches with little time to rest and recuperate between seasons due to major tournaments that now take up most summers.
The Times’ Martyn Ziegler said that after deliberating, UEFA’s club competitions committee “ruled out” a potential solution that would have given knockout football a fresh perspective and probably encouraged other governing bodies to do the same.
Extra time, which presently serves as a tie-breaker in the form of 30 extra minutes if teams are tied at the completion of the second leg of a knockout match, was not recommended to be eliminated in UEFA club tournaments by the committee.
“There had been some pressure to scrap extra time to reduce the burden on players in an already congested fixture calendar,” Ziegler writes.
“There is also an argument that it gives an unfair advantage to the team playing at home in the second leg.”
In 2021, UEFA removed the away goals rule in an effort to better balance two-legged matches.
Since then, fifteen of the 37 Champions League games that have gone to extra time have resulted in a penalty shootout. Just over half of the matches that have gone to extra time in the Conference League and Europa League have concluded in penalties.
According to Ziegler, the UEFA committee’s decision was motivated by concerns about unfancied clubs playing bad football in an attempt to win a penalty shootout, which is a more equitable tiebreaker.
It was furthermore thought that “it is better to try to achieve a result by playing extra time instead of going straight to the lottery of penalties.”
At lesser levels of the game, extra time is often avoided in favour of drawn cup matches that go straight to penalties and is frequently attacked as a tie-breaker.
SPORTbible is aware that demands to develop a general rule on extra time, which is a matter for tournament organisers, have not been made to IFAB, the organisation that makes laws governing football.
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