14 DAY TRIAL // Firstly, what's your advice to building a successful club? Simple, I believe you should have a long-term vision and set your own goals both short and long term. A decent group of footballers is always helpful too.
How extensive are the upgrade options for your stadium and facilities; what are some of the most extreme things you can do? Indoor training stadiums and training camps exist, these are great for enhancing your general teamwork, and the outdoor facilities can be upgraded to level five at most, this is the level you'll experience if you make a real-life visit to any of Europe's most mighty clubs.
The entire office departments are set to three stages of ability. When they are upgraded, management efficiency will be improved. For example, you can meet better sponsors or you can establish overseas facilities.
Ultimately, you can build your stadium to an 110,000 capacity. It will cost a fortune and take a long time to complete, and will be costly to maintain, but it's all worthwhile when you look at the home of your club with pride (and receive the gate receipts).
What are your favorite facilities and merchandise in the game? Facility-wise, I like the sauna. This is partly because I like saunas myself, but mostly as it will relieve players' fatigue. In terms of merchandise, it has to be a secret item, so I'll go for airplane. One task in the game is to target an affluent fan-base to increase merchandise sales - when it gets to stage when you're selling your fans branded private jets (not available for purchase in the superstore), you know you've achieved you goal!
Talking of fan-bases, where did that idea come from? Real football club management gave me a clue; I considered what real-clubs do, in order to become larger and stronger. Of course, money, sponsors and TV broadcasting are all the tangible measures that clubs are judged upon, but where does it all come from? The fans! They are the people who spend their money on the club and make it what it is. If you look at Europe's top clubs today, targeting new fans is top of their long-term agenda.
You get a lot of staff to work with, why is this and who's your favorite? Put simply, because real football bosses have the staff to help them. Plus, when we were designing game we felt there were so many things to remember we intentionally put the staff in to ask as a sort of tutorial. It was deliberate!
In terms of team management you can hire a manager and youth team manager, four coaches and three scouts. I don't have my favorites as they all do a crucial job; but I do love it when an ex-player becomes a member of your coaching team after they retire.
Which club is your favorite real-life football franchise? It's a matter of opinion, but I respect Barcelona a great deal. It's great for football that they won the Champions League as they achieved it playing good, flowing attacking football when sometimes their opposition was so defensive.
But, you can't change which clubs you love and for that reason Arsenal are my choice, it hurt to lose the Champions League final, but to lose against a team like Barcelona softens the blow.
The Italian Football league has been hit with crisis recently, is this sort of scandal something that we might see in LMAST? There is no scandalous element in this game and it isn't what we were trying to achieve.