In addition to Kick Off itself being rubbish, the selling of it was cynical and exploitative too. Almost immediately after the release of Kick Off 2, Anco, the game's publishers, advertised no fewer than FIVE add-on data disks for it, all sold separately at prices ranging from £7 to £13, on top of the £25 already charged for the basic game. The disks added, almost exclusively, features which would be built in to Sensible Software for free.
For example, "Return To Europe" (£10) included a tournament structure for the three European club cup competitions, a feature which was part of Sensible Software from the off (along with a near-infinite selection of other customisable tournament formats). "The Final Whistle" (£13) added "two extra kits", the ability to look at a player's statistics before selecting him, four new pitch types and controllable corner-kicks and throw-ins, all of which were also built in to Sensible Soccer.
To buy Kick Off 2 and all of its data disks, which would still leave you with a game significantly shorter on features than Sensible Soccer (and incredibly fiddly to set up, requiring endless disk swaps to load in all the extra bits), would have cost a dedicated Amiga gamer a breathtaking £75, fully three times the price of the Sensible game - a cynical marketing scam which looks bad even today.
(Sensible Soccer offered upgrades later in
its life too, adding new features, up-to-date team and player information
and so on. However, rather than charge an extra £50 for them, Sensible
gave them to players for free if they sent in their original disk and a
token postage and handling charge - £2.95, if memory serves - the whole disk then being replaced with
the new version for ease of use. And when updates were made, anyone buying
the game for the first time automatically got the upgraded version.)