When Kostas Tsimikas scored Liverpool’s decisive penalty in the 2022 FA Cup final, the trophy was settled. Liverpool had beaten Chelsea 6-5 in the shootout at Wembley. The match score, however, stayed at 0-0.
Under statistical conventions such as Opta’s, the match is recorded as a draw, while the shootout identifies the team that advances or wins the trophy. Keeping those outcomes separate affects a manager’s win percentage and a player’s goals total.
Reading the Result
Start with the score after normal time: 90 minutes plus the referee’s allowance for time lost. If the competition requires extra time, there is another score to record when those additional periods finish. A shootout then produces its own result.
Whether reading a club report or a result on betting sites, the useful question is which stage the score describes. The score after normal time, the cumulative score after extra time and the shootout result each tell part of the evening’s story.
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Where the Match Ends and Penalties Begin
Law 10, published by The FA, provides the underlying distinction. Equal scores produce a drawn match, and the shootout takes place after the match has ended.
The competition’s rules determine how the teams reach that point. In the 2026/27 FA Cup, a competition-proper match level after normal time goes to two 15-minute periods of extra time. If the scores remain level, penalties decide the winner.
FA Cup qualifying matches retain a replay procedure, with extra time and penalties available in the replay.
A grassroots team secretary therefore needs the rules for that particular cup when completing the result. They establish whether the match score covers normal time alone or includes extra time.
What Goes in the Draw Column
Statistical records follow the provider’s or competition’s conventions. Opta counts shootout-decided matches as draws in its match-result records, an approach Manchester City explains in its article How Pep’s incredible managerial stats at City stack up, published on 11 August 2021.
Counting shootout successes as wins produces a different win percentage from counting only matches won in normal or extra time. The convention therefore needs to be stated alongside the figure.
Under the same convention, a shootout-decided draw can preserve an unbeaten run while ending a sequence of match wins. Recording shootouts separately lets a club retain that match history alongside its success or failure in progressing through the cup.
The Winning Kick and the Goalscorer’s Tally
Tsimikas’s decisive kick illustrates the distinction. It settled the shootout without changing the final’s 0-0 match score.
Goals scored in extra time count towards the match score and the scorer’s tally. So do penalties awarded and converted during normal time or extra time.
For US college soccer, Section 7 of the NCAA’s 2022 Official Soccer Statistics Rules specified that extra-time statistics counted towards team and individual totals, while shootout goals and saves were kept separately.
That edition also illustrates how record-keeping rules can vary. Article 2 generally counted shootout-decided contests as ties, while assigning a win and a loss for a shootout in the national championship game. The level match score remained, followed by the penalty outcome.
A separate shootout log gives coaches somewhere to record conversions, misses and saves without mixing them into figures accumulated during play.
Recording the Whole Evening
A complete entry keeps the normal-time score, the score after extra time where played, and the shootout result. The extra-time score includes goals from the whole match. Match goalscorers and shootout takers can then be listed in their respective records.
A clear result line might read: Team A 2-2 Team B after extra time; Team A won 4-3 on penalties.
For Liverpool’s final on 14 May 2022, it reads: Chelsea 0-0 Liverpool after extra time; Liverpool won 6-5 on penalties. That gives the drawn match its place in the statistics and Liverpool its place as cup winners.
Using separate fields also makes later checks easier. Anyone reviewing the season can see the score reached during play, the shootout outcome and the team that advanced without confusing them.
