The UCL Draw . its obviously fixed.

The UCL knockout stages draw was announced recently , which has again caused discussions, debates and forum wars about whether or not its fixed . Most of the conspiracy theorists claim some source that had predicted the draw before it had taken place . Now , i dont know if these people did actually predict the draw, but what i m sure of is that the draw cant have been left entirely to chance by UEFA . They have to atleast manipulate some fixtures . Now i am not saying UEFA does this for financial gains although that cud be true . What i m saying is that , since clubs cant be drawn against clubs from the same countries, UEFA has to manipulate the draw or atleast some part of it . Otherwise , it is quite possible that some club might be left without any possible opponents to play with . Let me explain this by an example . Now take this years draw , we all know that 16 clubs entered the knockout stage .

The 8 group winners ( lets name these as group A)

barca
man utd
chelsea
bayern
real madrid
shakhtar
tottenham
schalke

The 8 group runners up ( lets name these as group B)

inter
arsenal
milan
lyon
roma
valencia
marseille
copenhagen



Now, we all know how the draw process works. They first put 8 balls carrying the names of the 8 runners up teams into a pot ( lets say pot B) . Then first, they pick one ball at random from pot B (lets say B1)and reveal the name of the club inside it . Then for that club, they put those remaining teams from group A , that are not of the same country and werent from the same group in the first round( i.e. the group stage) into another pot. Then they pick a team at random from this second pot to decide who will face B1. They repeat this process for B2, B3 and so on upto B8.

Now lets say, the first team from pot B they pick is inter and they pick barca to face them.
Similarly lets say the next three draws are


Milan from pot B vs Bayern from the other pot

Lyon from pot B vs Real Madrid from the other pot

Valencia from pot B vs Schalke from the other pot.

Now lets say , the next team picked from pot B is arsenal . Then out of the 8 original teams from group A , that arsenal could possibly face , Barca , Bayern , Real Madrid and schalke have already been choosen . That leaves Man utd, chelsea, tottenham and shakhtar . But Arsenal cant face any of these teams as Man utd, chelsea , tottenham are from the same country as arsenal and shakhtar was in the same group with arsenal in the group stage . So Arsenal is left with no one to play against.

This was just one example . If the draw is left entirely to chance, there can be many similar situations where a club is left without any possible opponents. Now UEFA cant allow such a scenario to occur , so i am sure that they atleast manipulate some part of the draw to make sure this doesnt happen . Now i am not saying , that they r doing this just to prevent such scenarios and not due to some financial reasons ( sponsors , bribes from clubs , telecast revenue from big team matchups) . Or maybe they ARE doing it just becoz of this reason . Whatever the reason , there is no doubt that the draw or atleast some part of it is fixed.