2024 Paris Olympics: What is extra time in soccer? How added time, shootouts work

On Saturday, the United States women’s national soccer team will face off against Brazil in the finals of the 2024 Paris Olympics, where it will aim to win its first Olympic gold medal since 2012.
The Americans reaching this point didn’t always feel inevitable.
With a revamped roster and a new manager in Emma Hayes, who just began her third month on the job, the USWNT had its way in group play, winning its first three matches by a combined score of 9-2.
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In its quarterfinal and semifinal victories, however, those margins got significantly smaller. In both instances, a late goal from the Americans broke what had been scoreless, often frustrating deadlocks, with Trinity Rodman and Sophia Smith getting decisive, go-ahead strikes against Japan and Germany, respectively.
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How late, exactly, were the goals? They both occurred after the allotted 90 minutes of regulation, delivering 1-0 victories and avoiding the possibility of a penalty kick shootout.
As the USWNT gears up for its game this weekend against Brazil, another match in which the winner may very well not be determined until the final minutes, here’s what you need to know about extra time in soccer, how it works and more:
Extra time in soccer is effectively that overtime is in the NFL or NBA. If a game is tied at the end of regulation, which is 90 minutes in professional soccer, it moves on to two 15-minute periods.
In the wins against Japan and Germany, the USWNT got goals in the first half of extra time.
It is used in knockout stage rounds of club and international tournaments to decide a winner. In leagues throughout the world and in the group stage of international tournaments like the Olympics and World Cup, a match is simply called a draw if it’s even at the end of regulation.
If the score is still tied at the end of the 30 minutes of extra time, the match moves to a shootout.
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Penalty shootouts are among the most pressurized and stressful situations in which a player, team and its legions of fans can find themselves.
Each team selects five players to take a shot from the penalty spot, 12 feet out from the goal line. The teams alternate who takes a kick until each squad has gotten through its five players. The team with the most goals wins. If it’s still tied, it goes into sudden death, with teams alternating penalty kick takers until one scores and the other fails to do so.
A penalty shootout doesn’t always go through the five allotted attempts. For example, if a team makes its first four kicks and its opponent fails to convert on two of its first four, the match ends.
Golden goal is a sudden death variation of extra time in which a game ends if a team scores in extra time rather than allowing the full 30 minutes to elapse.
The concept was introduced for certain international tournaments in 1993 by FIFA and came into play in several notable instances. In the final of the UEFA European Championships in 1996 and 2000, a golden goal decided the winner, with Oliver Bierhoff scoring for Germany in 1996 and David Trezeguet for France in 2000.
Though it provided a dramatic end to tense, tightly contested matches, golden goal largely disappeared from professional soccer after 2003. In the USWNT’s two extra-time wins at the 2024 Paris Olympics, play continued after Rodman and Smith’s goals.
In virtually any professional or international soccer match, there’s a different kind of extra time — stoppage time.
In contrast to major American sports like the NFL and NBA, which have clocks that count down in each period and pause to account for stoppages in play, soccer uses a running clock that counts forward each half and doesn’t stop for in-game delays like substitutions, injuries, goals, time-wasting tactics and, more recently, video reviews.
Rather, the time for those various stoppages is added up by an official over the course of the match and added on to the end of each half in regulation and the end of each period in extra time. That added game time is known as stoppage time, though it’s sometimes referred to as injury time.
Though it’s often just a handful of minutes — particularly at the end of the first half, before many teams insert substitutes into the match — those seconds spent on substitutions, goals and injuries can sometimes add up to a significant chunk of additional time. In Brazil’s 4-2 semifinal win against Spain on Tuesday, there were 15 minutes of stoppage time tacked on to the end of the second half.
The USWNT’s game against Brazil in the gold medal match of the 2024 Paris Olympics will air on USA Network, with a Spanish language broadcast taking place on Telemundo. Streaming options for the game include NBCOlympics.com, the NBC Olympics app, Peacock and Fubo, the last of which offers a free trial to potential subscribers.
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