Opening game of 2026 World Cup prompts the question of how many red cards can a team receive before a football match can no longer continue
The opening match of the 2026 World Cup saw three men sent off at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. South Africa were beaten 2-0 against Mexico having seen two players sent off, while the co-hosts also ended the game with 10 men after a late dismissal for Cesar Montes.
The three red cards made it the first World Cup opening match to feature three dismissals.
The game itself was largely decided by goals from Julian Quinones and Raul Jimenez, but the disciplinary record was one of the major talking points. South Africa lost Sphephelo Sithole and Themba Zwane to red cards, leaving Hugo Broos’s side with nine players for much of the second half before Montes was also dismissed in stoppage time.
Three red cards in a single match is relatively rare at the highest level. It is even rarer at a World Cup. The tournament has generally become less violent over the past two decades, with relatively few dismissals compared with previous eras, which made the events in Mexico City notable.
The game was completed but it does prompt a question: how many red cards can a team receive before a football match can no longer continue?
Under the Laws of the Game, a match cannot start or continue if a team has fewer than seven players on the field. Since teams begin with 11 players, a side can lose four players to red cards and still continue with seven. A fifth sending-off would reduce them to six players and force the referee to abandon the match.
That means a team can technically receive four red cards and still complete a game. So let’s just say that South Africa were not exactly riding the line here.
But has a football match ever ended due to five red cards for a team? Not that we know of currently, but a few have occasionally come close to that threshold.
The most famous example is the so-called “Battle of Bramall Lane” between Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion in 2002. Sheffield United had three players sent off, which normally is not enough to end a game, but then they lost two more players to injury having used up all of their available substitutions.
With only six players remaining, the match was abandoned after 82 minutes. It remains the only match in English professional football history to be stopped because one team no longer had enough players.
There is another occasion on record when things came close during a World Cup. Portugal’s last-16 victory over the Netherlands in 2006 became known as the “Battle of Nuremberg” after producing four red cards and 16 yellow cards. However, both teams retained enough players to finish the match.
