Questions & Answers about Si el partido terminaba en empate, habría prórroga.
Terminaba is the imperfect indicative, and here it helps express a condition seen from a past point of view.
This sentence is the past-version equivalent of:
- Si el partido termina en empate, habrá prórroga.
If the match ends in a draw, there will be extra time.
When that same idea is reported from the past, Spanish often shifts the tenses back:
- termina → terminaba
- habrá → habría
So terminaba does not necessarily mean the match actually ended in a draw. It means: if that happened, then...
By contrast:
- terminó = ended / a specific completed past event
That would sound more like you are talking about what actually happened, not about a condition.
Habría is the conditional tense of haber, and here it means there would be.
It is used because the sentence is describing something that was in the future relative to a past moment:
So habría works as a kind of future-in-the-past.
Compare: