Three small things that were in your way

Most of this diary is about things we added. This one is about three things that were already there and got in the way. None of them was a feature, and all three could stop a player from playing.

The cookie card on top of the sign-in button

A player wrote to us to say the login page was "dropping phishing cookies". It was not. On a phone, the consent card sat at the bottom of the screen and covered the sign-in button completely when the page was scrolled to the bottom. The card looked like a warning and the button was underneath it, so the page looked broken.

The card now has a proper close button, and the page reserves its height on small screens, so the sign-in button can always scroll above it. The announcement popup also waits until you have made a choice, instead of fighting the card for the same corner of the screen.

A match that never ended

If you closed the tab in the middle of a live match, the game remembered the match as being played. The result was blocked, the head coach was blocked, and time could stop at that fixture. There was no way out except finishing a match you had already left.

A session left alone for a day is now cleared, wherever the game checks for it: when you start a match, when you ask for the result, when the coach takes over, and when the clock moves. The match can be played again, and the career keeps moving.

The match screen on a phone

The match screen is the busiest page in the game: the score, the clock, the tabs, the bench, the substitutions, the half-time break and the full-time report. On a phone it used to spill sideways and hide controls.

It now fits at phone width, from the first whistle to the report. We checked it at 375 and 390 pixels wide, in every state: before kick-off, live, at half-time, full time and in the analysis. No sideways scrolling, no button under the edge of the screen.

Why small fixes matter

A game you cannot open is not a game, however good the rest of it is. These three fixes will never appear in a feature list. They are the difference between a player staying and a player closing the tab.

If something stops you playing, tell us. We read everything, and a short message with a screenshot is worth more than a long report.