How do Euro 2020 suspensions work?

With the group games done, we are now into the knockout section of the tournament – but will any players get “knocked out” by suspension for picking up a red card or yellow cards in two different games?

The rules on red and yellow cards are similar to at most recent European Championships and World Cups. Any player receiving a red card – and there were two in the group stage: Ethan Ampadu of Wales and Poland’s Grzegorz Krychowiak – is suspended for the next game. As is usually the case, the suspension could be lengthened for serious misconduct.

Receiving a yellow card in two separate matches also incurs a one-match ban in the next game, but only as far as the semi-final: there is an amnesty on single yellow cards after the completion of the quarter-finals. So while a player receiving his second tournament booking in the quarter-final will be suspended for the semi – as happened to four players during Euro 2016, including Wales’s Aaron Ramsey and Ben Davies – all single yellow cards incurred up to and including the quarter-finals are wiped before the semis.

This means that a player cannot be suspended for the final for a yellow card in the semi-final after also being booked earlier in the tournament, which could be known as the “Gazza clause” after Paul Gascoigne’s tears following his late booking in England’s Italia 90 semi-final against West Germany which would have ruled him out of the final.

Indeed, the only way that a player can be suspended for the final is by being sent off in the semi-final. The last player to miss a Euros final through suspension was Greece’s Giorgios Karagounis, banned from the 2004 final after managing to get booked in all four games he played (the first two group games, the quarter and the semi). With fitting stoicism, he shrugged off the second suspension as “One of those things.”

Yellow card accumulations do not continue into the next tournament, so any player picking up a yellow in the semi and final will not be banned for his country’s next game, either when World Cup qualifiers resume in September or the next European Championship qualifiers commence in March 2023. Suspensions for red cards are, however, carried into World Cup qualification. 

Originally published by FourFourTwo, 24 Jun 2021