It doesn’t look great for Manchester United, but that would be one hell of a tie between Bayern and Barca.
Ahead of every Champions League draw, conspiracy theories abound about the draw being fixed to suit certain teams. Manchester United, for example, are often believed to be guaranteed a handy draw for the group stages despite little or no evidence to suggest that there’s any skulduggery at hand.
Before the draw for the last 16 in December, a Twitter account called CL Draw Manipulation (@uefacorruption – over 20,000 followers despite less than 30 tweets) claimed that they had predicted the draw hours before it was actually made only for it to subsequently to become clear that they had allowed for every possible eventuality and subsequently deleted all of them apart from the draw that had officially taken place.
That said, it’s still interesting to conduct a fake draw to look at the potential mouth-watering ties that might come out of it and below is what the same account came up with ahead of the draw in Nyon later this morning.
Borussia Dortmund Vs Chelsea
— CL Draw Manipulation (@uefacorruption) March 21, 2014
Real Madrid Vs Manchester United
— CL Draw Manipulation (@uefacorruption) March 21, 2014
Bayern München Vs Barcelona
— CL Draw Manipulation (@uefacorruption) March 21, 2014
Atlético Madrid Vs Paris Saint-Germain
— CL Draw Manipulation (@uefacorruption) March 21, 2014
Despite another Cristiano Ronaldo return to Old Trafford, we don’t think United fans would be too happy if this is how the draw transpired, while the Bayern v Barca clash is the undoubted fake tie of the fake round.
The beauty about this draw is that it took only a couple of minutes to put together, as opposed to the real thing. That gets underway at 11am so we can expect to find out the final pairings sometime around 3.30pm this afternoon.
