Football
Know your facts:
- Unified Sports? Yes
- Estimated number of athletes participating: 735 athletes+ 105 Unified partners
Football is a team sport. In Special Olympics, more than 300,000 athletes play the sport worldwide.
Special Olympics feature:
In our competitions seven play against seven with some special rules:
- The goalkeeper throws the ball into play.
- The goal has a size of 5x2 meters.
- A team has a maximum of 12 players, substitutions are unlimited.
- There is no offside rule.
- After the ball has been out of bounds, it must be kicked back into play, and no direct goal can be scored.
- There are two halves of 20 minutes each, with a five minute halftime break.
- If there is a tie at the end of the game, there will be two five-minute overtime periods. If still no team is victorious after that, it goes directly to a penalty shootout.
We have four competitions at National Games:
- Team competition - Women
- Team competition - Men
- Unified Sports Team Competition - Women
- Unified Sports Team Competition - Men
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