Roy of the Rovers accident had resulted in the amputation of his famous left foot, ending his playing career and resulting in his move to Italy as the manager of Serie A side AC Monza (a fictional top-level Italian club, rather than the real club of the same name). Reconciling the continuity of the monthly strip with the stories that preceded and followed it presented difficulties, forcing the story's writers to alter its history in a number of ways, a technique known as retroactive continuity. Significantly, the strip rewrote various parts of Melchester's history, and shortened Roy Sr.'s recorded playing career to a more
Roy of the Rovers that were more realistic". There has been no new material since 2001, but reprints of the strip have appeared online and in print. The "Roy of the Rovers" website has archived all of the "Match of the Day" years' material, in addition to excerpts from other classic strips. In October 2007, Setanta bought the original strips, which they featured on their web site. Then-rights holder, Egmont, published a 64-page "collectors edition" of the comic strip in April 2009, gathering together a number of 1980's era Roy of the Rovers stories in addition to other backup strips from the comic. Two