We have decided to pass the game on to new owners. Its no secret that we have had very little time to work on the game recently and haven't been able to take it on to the next level and to the larger audience it deserves. Ideally we would like someone from within the game to take over, who has the time, enthusiasm and skills to develop and improve it and we will assess all offers with these ideals in mind. I would personally like to thank all managers, past and present, for your contributions to the game. Without you it could not exist!

This page is for those interested in making an offer to buy the game (Last updated 30th October)

What technical skills are required to run the game? Technically, the owners need to have a fairly good standard of knowledge of ASP, MySQL databases and VB.net (2003). The website has been developed using ASP, CSS and Javascript, all of which are not necessarily optimised! But all of the pages have been written in a style that should be simple to follow, understand, and modify. The game uses one main MySQL database (as well as using an MS Access database for logins), the hosting company provide phpMyAdmin for administration but you can use your choice of editor. The match engine is one big Visual Basic application which controls almost all parts of a "matchday update". It can run as an executable file (we schedule it to run at the matchday times) which requires no technical knowledge but it is envisaged that new owners would want to look at and then modify the code as they see fit. This code is fairly old and also not optimised, but it has at least been upgraded from VB5 to VB.Net 2003.

What will happen to the game between now and the completion of the takeover? We don't see any reason why the game should not run as normal. There may be some glitches when the new owners finally take control but these "shouldn't" be too disruptive.

How much will ITN cost to buy? At the current time we are open to all offers. But it is more important to us that the game goes to the right person/people so we will look at the offer as a whole, including current involvement in the game, technical ability, ideas for development and preferably a desire to keep ITN free to play and accessible to all.

How much time does it take to run? Using the automated updates this can take less than an hour and only needs supervision, but responding to e-mails and dealing with applications etc requires daily activity (and we are very lucky to have such a good Admin team at the moment). If any developments are made then these obviously take additional time.

Can the new owners be a consortium or group of people? Absolutely. But please appoint only one person as the point of contact for all matters to avoid confusion.

How much help will you give the new owners? We will, of course, do all we can to both ensure a smooth takeover and that the new owners are completely happy that they can support all aspects of the game. To this end, we will offer to help as much as possible during the first month, but may have to charge for our time after this if we see fit. However, we do not foresee the takeover taking longer than a month.

What about the hosting? The site is currently hosted with 3essentials.com and we do not intend to transfer the hosting as part of the takeover, we will instead transfer the account details and it will be up to the new owners to move the site later if they wish.

Is the game currently profitable? The Google AdSense ads used on the site pretty much pay for the hosting, domain name and the Google AdWords advertising used to advertise the site (albeit not very heavily). So the game breaks-even although there is much scope for improving this aspect.

Please send all initial offers or any further questions to inthenet@itnsoccer.com