Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho and Sir Alex Ferguson all attended this week’s Uefa summit in Nyon, Switzerland, pushing for extra time to be scrapped.

The argument is that exhausted players are dragged out for the 30 minutes of extra time if a conclusion hasn’t been drawn during the match and not much tends to happen. The players, more often than not, are just waiting for the penalties that will inevitably come. Therefore, it’s seen as a waste of time.

Sir Alex Ferguson led the campaign, with the likes of Wenger and Mourinho backing him up.

“I don’t think we like to see players exhausted in extra-time and when the whistle goes at the end of 90 minutes, I’ve always the feeling it’s going to go to penalty kicks,” SAF explained.

“You saw in the last Champions League final, players walking about… it’s inevitable that it goes to penalty kicks so the question is how we can improve it?”

Ioan Lupescu, Uefa’s chief technical officer, pointed out how many smaller teams can use extra time to their advantage as they have more of a chance to defend.

“Some coaches said it could be direct to penalties, others thought that could be an advantage for the smaller teams who could defend more,” he said.

“One thing that is very clear is that these days the players play so many matches and we raised the question whether from their point of view it is still worthwhile having extra-time.”

From a fan’s perspective, personally, I totally agree that extra time should be scrapped. Arsenal players have enough problems with injuries as it is. Obviously, we do need to deal with this internally but after players have been running around for 120 minutes, it’s exhausting to watch.

If draws went straight to penalties, it might actually make it more exciting and give both teams more of an incentive to push on, since I doubt there are many players who want to see the conclusion drawn from spot-kicks.