Why aren't all of the real-life rules recreated exactly in the game?

In order to make the app work smoothly on even the most basic devices, there are a few aspects of real life football that we've had to simplify. Sometimes we have to decide whether it would be worth adding a whole load of extra code just to implement a fairly minor rule or regulation.

For instance, in the European competitions, in real life you wouldn't get drawn in the first knockout round against one of the clubs who you played in the group stage. In the app, this does happen sometimes, but it's such a minor issue that we felt it wasn't worth all the additional code and data to make it work like that.

Another example is that, if you finish third in a real-life Champions League group, you end up in the knockout stages of the Europa League. To implement a similar rule in the app would have involved making a large amount of changes to the structure of the game's database. Again, we had to take the decision that it wasn't worth adding the extra complexity into the game for a rule that only affects a small number of teams each year.

Despite the fact that we've had to make a few compromises here and there, we like to think that we've still managed to create a pretty realistic game universe in an app that works well on even some really old and basic devices.

And as devices continue to improve all the time, hopefully we'll be able to continue adding even more depth and realism to future versions of the game!