For most of the last thirty years a football match lasted about 95 minutes of wall clock time and everyone accepted the arithmetic. That number moved at the 2022 World Cup and it has not moved back.
The practical effect is that a Saturday 3pm kickoff is still live when it used to be finished, and the tail of one match now overlaps the start of the next. If you follow more than one game at a time, the Premier League live scores and table will show the actual elapsed minute of everything in progress, which is the only way to know whether a scoreline is final or has six minutes left in it.
The rule was always there
Nothing about the law changed in 2022. What changed was compliance.
Allowance is made in either period for all time lost.IFAB, Law 7
That sentence has sat in the Laws for decades. What sits under it is a list of what counts as time lost, and it has grown:SubstitutionsCounted since the law was written. Five substitutes per team instead of three roughly doubled the cost.Goal celebrationsAdded explicitly by IFAB in 2019. A 90 second celebration by the corner flag is now returned in full.VAR checksAdded when VAR entered the Laws. A three minute review is three minutes added, which is why review length became a public argument.Treatment and disciplinary sanctionsAlways counted, rarely measured accurately before 2022.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2019 | IFAB adds goal celebrations to the list of time lost under Law 7 |
| Nov 2022 | FIFA instructs World Cup referees to add the time actually lost rather than a default three or four minutes |
| Aug 2023 | Premier League adopts the same approach from the start of 2023/24 |
| 2023/24 | UEFA applies comparable guidance across its club competitions |
Pierluigi Collina, chair of the FIFA referees committee, set out the reasoning publicly before Qatar.
What it looked like in Qatar
England against Iran in the group stage is the reference case. Roughly 14 minutes were added to the first half and 13 to the second, and the match ran past 117 minutes in total, the longest a World Cup match had run without extra time. Several other group matches passed 100 minutes, and the pattern held into the knockout rounds instead of being quietly dropped once the games got tighter.
The knock on effects
- Late goals became a larger share of the total. Adding five minutes instead of three hands every team roughly two extra minutes of chances, played against tired legs and broken defensive shape.
- Substitution patterns shifted. With five substitutes available and a real chance the 96th minute exists, managers stopped treating the 85th minute as the end of the useful bench.
- Time wasting got more expensive. A goalkeeper taking 30 seconds over a goal kick is now visibly donating that time back instead of burning it, which is the behavioural change the whole thing was designed to produce.
Still unresolved
Player unions raised the calendar issue before any of this started. Adding five minutes per match on top of an expanded Champions League league phase compounds a workload problem that already existed, and nobody has published a clean study separating the effect of longer matches from the effect of more matches.
The other open question is the stopped clock. Every time a match runs to 104 minutes, somebody proposes two halves of 30 minutes with the clock stopped, as in rugby league. IFAB has looked at it and shelved it more than once. The current approach is what a stopped clock looks like when you refuse to install one.
FAQ
How much added time is normal now?
There is no fixed figure, which is the point of the change. The referee measures what was lost, so a match with two long VAR checks and six goals will carry far more added time than a flowing 0-0. What has changed is that eight or nine minutes no longer signals a scandal.
Does added time count towards a player’s minutes played?
Yes. Official minutes played include stoppage time, which is part of why squad workload figures rose measurably from 2023/24 without the fixture count changing.
The scoreline alone is no longer enough information. You need the minute, and on a full fixture list you need it for several matches at once. The NameScore iOS app pushes goals the second they are given and confirmed lineups about an hour before kickoff, which is the window where real team news lands rather than the speculation that runs all week.
Expect the average to settle rather than keep climbing. Referees have absorbed the instruction, players have adjusted their time wasting, and the marginal minute is getting harder to find. The 95 minute match is not coming back either.
