Chaos looms in the Champions League draw. Of course – what did you expect?

 

 

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By Tony Attwood

The draw for the next round of the Chapions League starts at 11am UK time, and different times in other zones, with the last 16 round games being played over two legs as always, the first on 10 or 11 March and the second one week later on 17 or 18 March.

There were of course, eight clubs that got qualification for this upcoming round without playing in the recent knock-out extra round.    Of those eight, no less than five came from the Premier League: Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool, Tottenham Hots!, and Chelsea.

Alongside them will be the teams that played in the extra round and got through.  From England that means Newcastle United.   The rest are:

• Bayern Munich (Germany),
• Sporting CP (Portugal)
• Barcelona (Spain)
• Real Madrid (Spain) 
• Paris Saint-Germain (France) 
• Atlético Madrid (Spain)
• Atalanta (Italy) 
• Bayer Leverkusen (Germany) 
• Galatasaray (Turkey) 
• Bodø/Glimt (Norway)

Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham are all seeded clubs, so they should all be playing away in the first leg, but that would mean all three playing at home in midweek when the second legs are played.

But the Met Police have never given permission in recent years for Arsenal and Tottenham to play at home in Europe on the same day.   Although when the clubs both got drawn together at home in the FA Cup, in the days when all the games normally all kicked off at 3pm on a saturday, because there was no fottie on the tele, as it were, the Met insisted that one kick off at 2.45pm and the other at 3.15pm.

So would UEFA and all of the other relevant authorities be happy to have any two of the three London clubs playing on the same Tuesday or Wednesday night? As UEFA states, they reserve the right to reverse any fixtures and in fact, do anything else they deem necessary, so the draw might well not be the last we hear about all this.

It is widely said by those who claim to be in the know that UEFA is pretty fed up with this dominance of English teams, what with five of the eight clubs that qualified immediately being Premier League teams.   Especially as these days, Uefa seem to have agreed that PSG play Real Madrid in the final.   It will be interesting to see how they fix that this time around.

The main thing to remember is that whatever the draw says about who plays who, and then when and in which order, that might well not be the end of it.