Football Once Made Teams Play the Same Match Again Until Someone Won

Penalty shootouts feel like a permanent fixture of knockout football today, the obvious way to settle a tied cup match. For most of the sport’s history, they didn’t exist at all. If a cup tie finished level, the two teams simply played the whole match again, sometimes more than once, until somebody actually won.

A simple idea that could spiral out of control

The logic behind replays was straightforward: a knockout tie is meant to produce a winner, and a draw doesn’t actually decide anything, so the fairest solution was to play again rather than settle things on a coin toss or a smaller, less meaningful shootout. For decades, that’s exactly what happened across major cup competitions worldwide, including England’s FA Cup, one of the oldest tournaments in football.

Most replays did settle things on the second attempt. Some didn’t. English football has produced FA Cup ties that needed four, five, even six matches to finally produce a winner, an entire mini-tournament’s worth of football just to get past a single round. Each replay meant an entirely fresh 90 minutes, sometimes with extra time added on top, played out over multiple weeks as both clubs’ fixture schedules absorbed the extra matches.

Why the system eventually broke down

As football calendars became more crowded, with domestic leagues, multiple cup competitions, and increasingly demanding European fixtures all competing for the same weeks, the idea of open-ended replays became close to unworkable. A team stuck in an endless replay cycle in one competition could see their entire season’s schedule thrown into chaos, forced to squeeze in extra matches with little recovery time between them.

Penalty shootouts, introduced into major competitions from the 1970s onward, offered football administrators exactly what replays couldn’t: a guaranteed result on a fixed date, without eating into an already packed calendar. Competitions gradually reduced how many times a tie could be replayed before moving straight to extra time and penalties, and many, including the FA Cup itself in recent years, have scrapped replays for certain rounds entirely.

What got lost along the way

For fans of a smaller club, a cup replay against a bigger opponent used to mean a second, sometimes third, bite at a famous scalp, extra ticket revenue, and another night under the lights that wouldn’t otherwise have existed. Replays occasionally produced some of football’s most dramatic moments precisely because both teams got a second, cleaner shot at settling things on the pitch rather than through a shootout neither side particularly wanted.

Losing that tradition was mostly about survival rather than choice. Modern football simply generates too many fixtures, across too many competitions, for teams to keep replaying matches until a winner emerges the old-fashioned way. What used to be a point of pride, refusing to settle a tie on anything other than actual football, quietly became a luxury the calendar could no longer afford.

Do penalty shootouts feel like a fair way to settle a match that couldn’t be decided in 90 minutes, or did football lose something meaningful when it stopped simply playing the game again?