this cannot possibly be anything else but a bug.
admin has showed that he can announce major changes well in advance. this would have been a huge change, so he would have said something about it a season ago.
therefore, the only explanation for this disaster would be the fact that admin lets the game unattended for long periods of time. and, most likely, in spite of anything he might say, he is the only person taking care (once in a while) of the game. should a second person had been entrusted with helping him, admin would have found out already about what's going on and would have made some sort of a statement to let us know how things are.
and, probably, the bug would've been fixed already.
my suggestion to ALL of you reading this: please write him an e-mail expressing your thoughts on this matter. he needs to know we care about this game and needs to really take his job seriously.
to ADMIN: you have some explaining to do, mister! and some compensation to all of us, such as running trainings in manual mode, to make up for the trainings we lost this season. this is not the first time we lost training this season!