Champions League Draw Rigged?

[MDL Man]

rumours of a draw fix now being carried by The Daily Mirror's website.

Apparently a Liverpool fan site disclosed the full draw an hour and a half before the draw itself took place!

Luck? Odds are something like 191/1 apparently...

Daily Mirror article... http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/2008/03/14/mystery-as-champions-league-draw-appears-on-internet-two-hours-early-89520-20351088/

Original Liverpool news page... http://forums.liverpoolecho.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=33755

[shakermaker1982]

hmmmm interesting.... to be fair I guessed two out of 4 correctly at work this morning.

[Kingdom]

odds of 191/1 on a correct draw.

[superfrank]

Liverpool fans are always prophesing that they are the best club in England yet they haven't won the league siince 1990.....would you trust a Liverpool fan to tell you the truth?

[John83]

odds of 191/1 on a correct draw.
I've seen similar happen in the past. I don't quite remember the details, but it was a knockout round where UEFA claimed that clubs from the same country weren't being kept apart. If they were, there was only one legal draw, if not, there were many more. The specific draw which kept teams from the same country apart just came up. I would have little confidence that UEFA doesn't at least occasionally pick the draws.

I've an idea though: unscrupulous tabloid journalist (I have a feeling one of those words is redundant) finds 192 football forums and posts the 192 different possible combinations on them, then picks the right one and highlights a 'scandal'. Ooh, exclusive!

[feo123]

maybe mystic meg runs the website!?

[rambler14]

I doubt thats true, now if it was the FA Cup draw that people were saying is rigged then I would believe it because i've thought for years that it is.
It was proved in the 3rd round draw that they weren't calling out the right numbers so i'm even more suspicous of the FA Cup draw since then.

[jebus]

Lads people were trying to put wads of cash around Europe on Friday morning on the draw, bookies wouldn't take the bets as they feared something was up. This all looks very, very dodgy from what I've heard

[Réiteoir]

It's like me saying "the lottery numbers this week are .... as i saw the leaked draw"

There's only 28 possibilities without getting the home/away correct (49 with it correct) He makes no mention of the Semi Final line up, so the odds of getting it right aren't that big.

He got lucky in guessing the draw and saying it was leaked. On another day he would look a tit for getting it wrong

What's that thing about the monkeys writing the works of Shakespeare again?

[Réiteoir]

Anyway - some inside info from the same people who brought this to our attention - so get yer cash on this:

Apparently they said that Euro 2008 has been fixed and a team from somewhere in Europe will win the tournament.

Nod to the wise though - keep this under your hats

[jmurphyc]

Anyway - some inside info from the same people who brought this to our attention - so get yer cash on this:

Apparently they said that Euro 2008 has been fixed and a team from somewhere in Europe will win the tournament.

Nod to the wise though - keep this under your hats

Sh*t! I put money on Israel.

[geysir]

I've seen similar happen in the past. I don't quite remember the details, but it was a knockout round where UEFA claimed that clubs from the same country weren't being kept apart. If they were, there was only one legal draw, if not, there were many more. The specific draw which kept teams from the same country apart just came up. I would have little confidence that UEFA doesn't at least occasionally pick the draws.

The only one I can think off was the draw for the Qual play offs Eur 2000.
UEFA claimed there were no seedings and the draw was random.
But all the 4 top teams (England Turkey Ukraine and Denmark) got a favored draw and played away (against Scotland Ireland Slovenia Israel) in the first leg.
AFAIR the odds were something over 280/1 on that happening.

[Dodge]

There's no way they'd pair Roma with Ma Utd if it was rigged. Thats the draw UIEFA wanted to avoid completely

[Marked Man]

Really? I'd have thought that'd be the most intriguing tie of all.

[jmurphyc]

Really? I'd have thought that'd be the most intriguing tie of all.

In a footballing sense it is, but I don't think UEFA would pair them together if it was rigged due to the violence from fans in the last few games between the sides. UEFA don't want to deal with multiple stabbings from fans again.

[pete]

While the draw may not be rigged the CL draw in previous rounds gives an unfair advantage to teams from the big countries by keeping them apart. The only reason to do it is to shaft the smaller countries. If you are an english unseeded team it ensure you can't meet the strongest seeds (those from your own country).

If is like having an FA Cup draw with London teams not allowed play against each other in the early rounds.

[Marked Man]

In a footballing sense it is, but I don't think UEFA would pair them together if it was rigged due to the violence from fans in the last few games between the sides. UEFA don't want to deal with multiple stabbings from fans again.



Oh, right.....that.

Completely forgot about that.

[OwlsFan]

Personally, I think it was the man on the grassy knoll along with the assassin of Diana who rigged the draw. They just get everywhere:eek:.

[endabob1]

The only one I can think off was the draw for the Qual play offs Eur 2000.
UEFA claimed there were no seedings and the draw was random.
But all the 4 top teams (England Turkey Ukraine and Denmark) got a favored draw and played away (against Scotland Ireland Slovenia Israel) in the first leg.
AFAIR the odds were something over 280/1 on that happening.


The most intruiging part of that draw was that UEFA wanted to seed the draw but the 4 unseeded countries objected because it was effectively changing the rules mid-competition, only for the draw to come out exactly as they wanted it. I have no doubt that the draw was "influenced" the rumours were of hot & cold balls which would be pretty simple to do.
That said I suspect an internet fake with this current revelation.

[bennocelt]

talking about dodgy draws
England getting an island all to itself in 1990?
And then 2002, China placed in korea instead of japan was a bit obvious, and brazil in japan for the becks fans?

[jbyrne]

The only one I can think off was the draw for the Qual play offs Eur 2000.
UEFA claimed there were no seedings and the draw was random.
But all the 4 top teams (England Turkey Ukraine and Denmark) got a favored draw and played away (against Scotland Ireland Slovenia Israel) in the first leg.
AFAIR the odds were something over 280/1 on that happening.

i heard about that at the time too. apparently the balls with numbers (or whatever) for the 4 favoured teams were left on the radiator for a while so that the person picking them out of the bowl would know by touch which ones were for the favoured teams so that they could be kept apart

[OwlsFan]

i heard about that at the time too. apparently the balls with numbers (or whatever) for the 4 favoured teams were left on the radiator for a while so that the person picking them out of the bowl would know by touch which ones were for the favoured teams so that they could be kept apart

I also heard the earth is square.

[jbyrne]

I also heard the earth is square.

well its not

[Jerry The Saint]

It was proved in the 3rd round draw that they weren't calling out the right numbers

No it wasn't.

vzsSZ2OC_94

It was claimed by The Star that they weren't calling out the right numbers so that people would forget that the story was nonsense and bring it up the next time that rumours of a FIX came up.

[NeilMcD]

I love when they quote the odds of a draw likely to happen. If you pick any draw and at the end you say its fixed and you can then say well the odds of that happening before are 280/1, well there would be long odds no matter. What. PIcking the exact draw is long odds whether its fixed or not.

[John83]

I love when they quote the odds of a draw likely to happen. If you pick any draw and at the end you say its fixed and you can then say well the odds of that happening before are 280/1, well there would be long odds no matter. What. PIcking the exact draw is long odds whether its fixed or not.
The reason for that is simple. Imagine there's a coin toss, and I say it's going to be heads, and I'm right. I could claim that I knew the result, and it was rigged, but given I had a 50:50 chance of being right, no one would pay any attention to me.

Now, imagine for a moment I correctly predicted the lotto numbers and claimed it was rigged. It's a bit harder to claim I've just had a lucky guess.

The odds of correctly guessing a quarter final draw, assuming you don't care who is home in the first leg and can name the ties in any order, is (1/7)*(1/5)*(1/3)*(1) = 1 in 105. It's not the lotto, but it's no coin flip either. That makes a correct prediction difficult to ignore.