"It was a well reported flaw in the last version of the game," Jennings concedes. In terms of impact, it was LMA 2006's Calciopoli. They'd encourage your centre-forwards to work on their defensive skills, which were obviously a bit rubbish, to the detriment of their striking ability and eventual transfer value. The main problem was that the backroom staff were lousy. It was less daunting than the genre-leading Football Manager series, which we liked, built from the ground up for console control, and perfectly happy to let you hand off the less exciting elements of day-to-day football management to your backroom staff. Last year, we gave LMA Manager 2006 on PS2 and Xbox a bit of a kicking. It's not the only time the LMA team has been a bit annoyed about docked points. The poor old game, in its unmodified form, regarded minus 30 as the same as 30." Juventus fans probably wouldn't have minded. "We're obviously not far from submission now, and the team had to drop everything and work out how to handle a team starting on negative points. "That caused us headaches," says mild-mannered John Jennings, the game's executive producer. And he wasn't the only one cursing either - over in Warwickshire, the Codemasters team working on LMA Manager 2007 were feeling the effects too. His views on the whole thing are decidedly Anglo-Saxon and a bit unprintable. Fans went ballistic - taking to the streets, and, in Fiorentina's case, blocking off a railway line after Franco Zeffirelli appealed to fans to "cut Italy in half".Įffects have been far-felt. Within a week half the players involved were looking for new jobs. Italy won the World Cup on Sunday, 9th July. As I type, an Italian court is delivering its verdicts on the appeals made by four clubs caught up in Calciopoli - the Italian football corruption scandal - which has seen three of the country's biggest football sides relegated, two then reinstated, all four docked points, and only the Milanese allowed within half a mile of European competition. It's been a hell of a month for Italian football.
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