Suggestions for a major revision of the Laws of the Game were dismissed by Europe’s top football authority.
UEFA had been considering changes to the knockout stages of the Champions League and Europa League to help alleviate the heavy match schedule faced by players in the latter part of the season.
With increasingly crowded summer calendars filled with high-profile tournaments, top players are being required to perform in intense games with little recovery time between seasons. This has sparked growing demands for regulators to address player welfare.
Martyn Ziegler of The Times reports that UEFA’s club competitions committee discussed, but ultimately rejected, a measure that would have altered the knockout format and potentially set a precedent for other federations.
Specifically, the committee decided against scrapping extra time as the tiebreaker—currently, an additional 30 minutes is played if a knockout tie remains level at the end of the second leg.
“There had been some pressure to scrap extra time to reduce the burden on players in an already congested fixture calendar,” Ziegler noted, adding that extra time might also be seen as favoring the team hosting the second leg.
UEFA had already worked to make two-legged ties fairer in 2021 by abolishing the away goals rule. Since that change, extra time has been used in 37 Champions League matches—with 15 progressing to penalty shootouts—and in just over half of the extra time instances in Europa League and Conference League fixtures, penalties have decided the tie.
According to Ziegler, concerns that underdogs might deliberately steer games toward the supposedly more impartial penalty shootout influenced the committee’s ruling. There was also a sentiment that attempting to settle a match in extra time was preferable to immediately resorting to what many consider the randomness of a penalty shootout.
Extra time is frequently criticized as a knockout mechanism and is increasingly bypassed in lower-tier competitions, where drawn cup games often move directly to penalties.
Meanwhile, SPORTbible reports that IFAB, the body responsible for football’s laws, has not received any proposals to enforce a universal rule regarding extra time, leaving such decisions up to individual competition organizers.
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