Champions League Draw Rigged?

**jbyrne** · 20/03/2008, 9:39 AM

Originally Posted by geysir

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** · 20/03/2008, 9:46 AM

Originally Posted by jbyrne

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** · 20/03/2008, 10:50 AM

Originally Posted by OwlsFan

I also heard the earth is square.

well its not

**Jerry The Saint** · 20/03/2008, 11:08 AM

Originally Posted by rambler14

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

No it wasn't.

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** · 20/03/2008, 12:10 PM

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** · 20/03/2008, 12:22 PM

Originally Posted by 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.

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.