Players not returning from holiday.

I'm playing an online-game with a friend and we've just finished the first season. What happened the first summer has to be a bug. None of our players returned from their holiday until 21.07.09 (the first game of the season is 15.08.09) and that's when my friend had scheduled a friendly. The other PL-teams got their players back earlier, but I failed to register when. Needless to say this gives me and my friend a very short period to prepare the players for the new season, including giving them their pre-sesason-training.

Is the only way to avoid this next summer to schedule a friendly early in the summer or is this a known issue that will be fixed in the next patch?