FIFA Proposes One-Minute Off-Field Rule to Curb Injury Time-Wasting
Football’s global governing body, FIFA, is pushing for a new rule that would compel players who receive on-field medical treatment to remain off the pitch for at least one minute before returning to action — a measure designed to address one of the most persistent complaints in the modern game: deliberate time-wasting disguised as injury.
The proposal is expected to be tabled at the Annual General Meeting of the International Football Association Board (IFAB) on Saturday, and if approved by the game’s rule-making body, it would be formally incorporated into football’s Laws of the Game — the definitive global rulebook that governs how the sport is played at every level worldwide.
Under the current Laws of the Game, there is no mandatory period stipulating how long an injured player must remain off the field after receiving treatment. The absence of a fixed rule has long been a point of frustration for coaches, players, and supporters alike, as it has created a widely exploited grey area where teams leading in matches have used feigned or exaggerated injuries to run down the clock, disrupt the momentum of the opposition, and invite stoppages at tactically convenient moments.
While some domestic competitions have moved independently to address the problem, the solutions have been inconsistent and piecemeal. The Premier League, for instance, adopted a 30-second guideline beginning from the 2023-24 season, establishing a minimum off-field period for treated players. However, because this rule applies only within the Premier League’s own jurisdiction, its scope is limited and its enforcement variable.
IFAB, the body responsible for determining and updating the Laws of the Game, is a joint institution comprising FIFA and the four British football associations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Established in 1886, it is the oldest football governing body in the world and holds exclusive authority over the rules that apply to the sport globally. Any change that IFAB approves automatically becomes part of the international game.
-FIFA did not arrive at the one-minute proposal without prior experimentation. According to a report by the BBC, FIFA conducted its own trials at the Arab Cup in December, where the rule required a player to remain off the field for two minutes following medical treatment. The trial was overseen under the watch of FIFA’s referees’ chief, Pierluigi Collina, who has been among the most vocal advocates for reducing time-wasting and improving the flow of matches at the highest level.
Collina stated that the two-minute trial was specifically intended to reduce time-wasting and improve the overall tempo of play — an acknowledgment from within FIFA’s own officiating hierarchy that the status quo has long been inadequate.
However, the two-minute duration met with significant pushback. IFAB members, who convened in January to assess the findings and agree on a way forward, reached a broad consensus that a fixed time period should indeed be added to the laws. But there was considerable disagreement over precisely how long that period should be, with strong opposition emerging against the initial two-minute timeframe — a duration many felt was too punitive for players with genuine injuries and potentially damaging to teams that might legitimately lose a key player at a critical moment in a match.
The proposed one-minute rule has therefore emerged as a middle-ground position — a compromise between the desire to meaningfully deter time-wasting and the need to ensure that the welfare of genuinely injured players is not sacrificed at the altar of match tempo.
The debate over injured players and time-wasting is not unique to European football. Major League Soccer (MLS) in the United States has already introduced a comparable measure within its own competition framework. Under MLS rules, a player who remains on the ground for more than 15 seconds and requires the attention of medical personnel must leave the field temporarily before being permitted to return. The regulation is seen as one of the more assertive domestic attempts to curb deliberate stalling while still allowing for legitimate medical intervention.
The Premier League’s 30-second guideline, introduced ahead of the 2023-24 season, was itself a response to growing frustration among broadcasters, supporters, and pundits over the frequency with which matches — particularly in tightly contested games — were being interrupted by what appeared to be exaggerated or opportunistic injury claims. The measure drew attention to the issue but also illustrated the limitations of a domestic-only solution in the absence of a uniform global standard.
FIFA’s current proposal would, if adopted by IFAB, bring a degree of international uniformity to an area of the game that has until now been left largely to the discretion of individual competitions and referees.
The push for the one-minute rule sits within a broader effort by football’s governing bodies to reclaim the game’s playing time from an accumulation of delays, interruptions, and procedural stoppages that have progressively eaten into the active minutes of top-flight matches.
FIFA introduced an extended and more rigorously enforced stoppage-time policy at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, instructing referees to add all accumulated stoppage time — including time lost to goal celebrations, substitutions, VAR reviews, and injury stoppages — rather than applying the cursory additional minutes that had previously been standard. The policy led to some matches seeing seven, eight, or even ten minutes of additional time, and it drew both praise for its transparency and criticism for the extended duration of matches.
The injury treatment rule, if passed, would represent a more targeted intervention: rather than compensating for lost time after the fact, it would actively discourage the behaviour that creates unnecessary stoppages in the first place.
Critics of strict off-field time limits have argued that football cannot afford to treat all injuries with the same procedural suspicion, and that penalising a genuinely injured player by removing him from the field of play for a fixed period could have serious implications for team tactics, player welfare, and the integrity of individual matches. Supporters of the rule counter that the one-minute window is modest enough to cause minimal disruption for genuinely injured players while serving as a meaningful deterrent against manufactured stoppages.
-The proposal will face its most consequential test at Saturday’s IFAB Annual General Meeting, where representatives of FIFA and the four British associations will deliberate on its merits and vote on whether to formally adopt it into the Laws of the Game. Should it pass, football associations and domestic competitions around the world would be expected to implement the rule within a timeframe determined by IFAB.
The outcome of the meeting is not yet certain. While IFAB members broadly agreed in January on the principle of a fixed off-field period, the debates over duration and implementation suggest that the final vote may not be without dissent. The one-minute figure, while a compromise, may still face opposition from those who regard any mandatory off-field period as insufficiently protective of player welfare or potentially open to tactical manipulation of a different kind — whereby teams might deliberately seek to trigger the rule against key opposition players.