How many substitutions are allowed in soccer?
Each team can make just five substitutions per game (in three stoppages, so play isn't constantly broken up). Unlike American sports, there's no free in-and-out — once you're off, you're done for the day.
Explain further
The one-liner gives you the headline; here is how it actually plays out. The five subs must be made within three in-game stoppages (halftime does not count as one), a quirk designed to stop coaches from killing the clock with a parade of slow walk-offs. A manager who burns all three windows early can find himself stuck if a player gets injured later, so timing the changes becomes its own little strategic game.
The big adjustment for American fans is that there is no platooning or situational swapping. When a player comes off, he is gone for good: no offense-defense rotation, no slipping back on for a key possession. That is why you will see a tired star left on the field deep into the second half, the coach weighing whether a fresh body is worth permanently losing that player's quality.
Substitutions are also a fairly recent invention. For most of the sport's history teams had zero, so an injured man either limped on or left his side a player short. One replacement was finally allowed in the 1960s, and the number crept upward over the decades. Five became permanent only in 2022, partly to protect players from crowded schedules. So when older fans grumble about too many changes, they remember an era when there were almost none.