What happens when a football game is tied

Picture a Premier League Saturday: the ninetieth minute passes, the board goes up for a few added minutes, and the whistle goes with the score still 1-1. Nobody lines up for penalties. Players shake hands, the fans head for the exits, and the match is simply recorded as a draw. That is the full answer for league football, when the 90 minutes (plus stoppage time) run out level, the game is over.

In a league, a draw is a result in itself, not an unfinished story. Each side picks up one point for the draw, rather than the three points a win would bring. Over a long season those single points add up and shape where a team finishes in the table, so a 0-0 away from home can matter just as much as a narrow win, depending on the context.

Cup football works differently, and this is usually where the question comes from. In knockout competitions like the FA Cup or the Champions League, there is no such thing as a satisfying draw, because somebody has to go through to the next round and somebody has to go home. If the scores are level after 90 minutes, the players don't leave the pitch. Instead they get a short break and then play 30 minutes of extra time, split into two 15-minute halves, still looking for a winner.

If extra time finishes and the teams are still tied, it goes to a penalty shootout. Each side picks five players to take turns shooting from the penalty spot, and whoever has scored more after those five kicks has won. If it's still level after that, the shootout continues one kick at a time, sudden-death style, until one team has scored and the other has missed from the same number of attempts.

The exception a lot of people don't know about is the replay. Older cup formats, including rounds of the FA Cup in past years, sometimes dealt with a draw by simply scheduling the whole match again on another day, usually at the other team's ground. Whoever won the replay went through. It avoided penalties altogether, but it also meant extra fixtures squeezed into an already packed calendar, which is largely why the practice has mostly disappeared at the top level. Today, extra time and penalties are the standard way cup ties get settled when 90 minutes isn't enough.

So the short version: whether a tie ends in a handshake or a shootout comes down to the competition's format, not the state of the game itself. A draw in the league is a finished result. A draw in a cup match is just the signal that there's more football, and possibly penalties, still to come.