Copa América scrapped extra-time. Should other knockout tournaments?

Fans enjoying the feast of football served up this month by Copa América and Euro 2024, running concurrently on either side of the Atlantic, will have noticed one key difference between the two tournaments: there is no extra time at the end of tied games in the knockout stage of the South American championship.

Conmebol, South American soccer’s governing body, decided that there would be no extra time played if scores were level at full-time in the quarter- and semi-finals. Instead, as was the case in three of the four quarter-final fixtures, the teams skipped straight to a penalty shootout. Only if all is square between Argentina and Colombia at the end of 90 minutes in the final will there be the conventional extra period of 30 minutes.

The decision to ditch extra time has its drawbacks. The last-eight showdown between Uruguay and Brazil raised a particular point of contention because Marcelo Bielsa’s side were reduced to 10 men after Nahitan Nández’s was sent off in the 74th-minute. Uruguay managed to hold out for a 1-1 draw before booking their place in the semis with a 4-2 shootout victory. Had the common practice of extra-time at the end of a tied game been in place, however, they’d have had to play an extra half an hour with a one-man disadvantage.

“When we were one man down, we decided to dedicate ourselves to defend in our half,” Bielsa said after the game.

In a normal knockout tournament, Uruguay would have been hanging on for another 45 minutes. But instead they only had to sit-in for 20 minutes, with the game devolving into part-time-wasting exercise and part-brawl.

But while the lack of extra time at this year’s Copa América has garnered widespread attention, the format is nothing new. For most of the Copa América’s 108-year history, no extra period has been used before the final; and between 1995 and 2004, there was no extra time even in the final. The only tournament where extra-time was used for in every knockout round was 2011.

The aim of the format is to guard against player fatigue – with many of the stars on show having recently completed long and arduous seasons at club level – and to protect the quality of football at the tournament. This year’s competition has been baked in heat, and dropping extra-time has helped preserve players (and fans) from 30-minutes of lethargic play, heading instead straight to the drama of a shootout.

Top-level footballers are shouldering a higher and more intense workload than ever before. Uruguay midfielder Federico Valverde played 52 games in Real Madrid’s La Liga and Champions League-winning campaign in the 2023-24 European season, totting up 4,280 minutes. Forgoing the need for extra playing time is likely preserving the 25-year-old’s level of performance at Copa América, where he was key to La Celeste’s run to the semis. By way of contrast, his new club team-mate Kylian Mbappé was sub-par at the Euros by his standards after 48 and games and 3,869 minutes of action for Paris Saint-Germain and was substituted during the extra-time period of France’s quarter-final against Portugal.

And that workload will continue to tick up. Uefa’s overhaul of the Champions League means clubs will play two extra games in the competition next season. There is also an ongoing squabble between Fifa and the international ­players’ union about an expanded Club World Cup, set to be held in the US in 2025, that will place an additional load on players.

Conmebol’s eschewing of extra time is at least a minor concession to ease the increasing load placed on top players, even if it comes at the expense of greater randomness in knockout games settled by shootouts.

The idea of scrapping with extra time to claw some minutes back has gained at least one influential supporter in Europe.

“In a demanding tournament like the Euro, perhaps extra time could be abolished,” Luis de la Fuente, the head coach of Euro 2024 finalists Spain told reporters in Germany, saying that extra time should be in place only for the semi-finals and final.

In the last-16 and quarter-final rounds of this year’s edition of the tournament, five games were level after 90 minutes. Only two goals were scored in those five extra periods, with England edging out Slovakia and Spain beating Germany. Three of the fixtures were still decided by penalty kicks.

Dating back to Euro 2000, there have been 29 periods of extra time played in the knockout stages of the Euros. In all of those 30-minute blocks of additional play, a total of only 16 goals have been scored. And factoring in that some of these periods included multiple goals, only 13 of those extra-time spells included at least one goal. Of the 29 games with extra periods, 17 still went to penalties.

The Euros previously included an interesting innovation to limit the need for penalty kicks in the mid-90s and early 2000s. First, there was the ‘golden goal’, which was replaced for the 2004 edition by the ‘silver goal’.

Under the golden goal rule, any goal scored in extra time automatically ended the game, with the scoring team progressing – Germany beat the Czech Republic in the 1996 final with a golden goal and France beat Italy in 2000 thanks to David Trezeguet’s game-ending goal. The silver goal rule modified that idea to allow a right of reply for the conceding team, meaning a goal scored in the first half of extra time would only end the game in favour of the scoring team if they did not concede an equaliser before half-time in the extra period.

Between the 2000 and 2004 Euros, the golden and silver goal rules were in play for a total of six extra-time periods, with three goals scored. But the change resulted in just 35 minutes of playing time being saved. The silver goal was discarded after 2004, with conventional extra-time rules reintroduced.

The debate around whether or not Copa América’s abandoning of extra time should be adopted elsewhere comes down to a matter of opinion over what is preferable: a potentially worsened quality of play through fatigue or an increased number of games being decided by the comparative randomness of penalty kicks.

But if authorities are going to increase the workload on players, then removing an additional 30 minutes in knockout tournaments is one way of curbing burn-out – and the tired play that comes with it.