Sports Big Business No. 2749, welcome to pay attention to the leading sports industry information platform
Wen | Zhang Tan
Sports big business reporter
The "Merro Wars" is yellow!
The results of the first round of the Champions League knockout draw, which swept the world's sports media and social platforms, were declared invalid just over an hour later, and UEFA was once again pushed to the forefront by public opinion.
After the obvious problems in the draw process, Atletico first expressed doubts, and then Sky Sports also asked UEFA officials, public opinion began to ferment, and Real Madrid and other teams also joined the queue of doubts.
At 20:45 Beijing time, UEFA made a decision to re-draw after discussion, and re-draw at 22:00 Beijing time. At the same time, the results of the europa league and europa league draws, which were scheduled to start later, have been announced one after another.
Although the result of the second draw, there is still a heavyweight showdown like Real Madrid vs Paris. But it is clear that the lottery incident is a big blow to UEFA's public image.
The biggest oolong event in UEFA history
The rules for the draw against the Champions League round of 16 are not complicated: the 16 teams are divided into seeded and non-seeded teams according to the group stage ranking, and there are only two principles of avoidance - avoidance in the same country and avoidance in the same group.
The process of drawing lots is that the UEFA Secretary-General first draws the non-seeded teams, and after determining the candidate teams according to the principle of avoidance, the staff will put the possible draw balls into the lottery pool, and the guests will draw against the teams.
But in just a few minutes, there were two major mistakes on the scene:
In the second group of matches, Villarreal, the second group in group F, was drawn as a non-seeded team. When the seeded team was drawn, the guest Arshavin slowly unfolded the note, but found that the team on the note was Manchester United, and the two sides were the same group opponents in the group stage, which obviously did not conform to the principle of avoidance of the same group.
Arshavin's "Villarreal vs Manchester United" did not conform to the same group avoidance rules
Soon, the result of the draw was declared invalid and Arshavin re-drew the lottery to win Manchester City for Villarreal.
In the next set of matches, Atletico Madrid was the first to draw as a non-seeded team, and its opponent seeded team drew the championship favourite Bayern Munich. However, the replay footage showed that before the seeded team was drawn, Manchester United was not put into the lottery pool, but instead Liverpool, who was in the same group as Atletico Inletico, was put into the lottery pool.
This also means that Atletico may draw Liverpool and repeat the possibility of the same team just drawing the quarter-finals, which also means that the possibility of Atletico vs Manchester United has been ruled out by human error.
Atletico then questioned UEFA, and some media outlets such as Sky Sports followed suit. At this time, the lottery is still continuing in the controversy, but off-site public opinion is constantly fermenting and escalating, and "conspiracy theories" frequently appear on social media.
Before Atletico's official announcement at 20:38, several teams had already raised questions with UEFA. The impartiality of the results of the first draw is increasingly untenable. After weighing the pros and cons, UEFA finally decided to re-conduct the full draw at a later date.
Atletico issued a 20:38 announcement questioning UEFA
Is it all the scourge of outsourcing? Should there be a market for "conspiracy theories"?
At 20:45 Beijing time, 1 hour and 45 minutes after the first draw began, UEFA wrote in its official announcement:
"Due to technical problems with the software of the external service provider, the software prompted the field officials that some teams could play against each other, resulting in a major mistake in the draw process. The results of the previous draw are invalid and will be re-drawn at 15:00 local time. ”
Fans can't help but sigh, "Pushing the responsibility to the outsourced third party turned out to be universal" ...
UEFA tweet announcing a re-draw due to "technical issues with outsourced software"
Because the rules of the Champions League draw are not complicated and the difficulty of setting the program is very low, even the football games of many years ago can make the Champions League draw link tightly. As a result, it's hard to really believe that there will be so-called "major technical mistakes" on the software supply side.
The famous football journalist Romano reported that UEFA confirmed that the lottery would be re-drawn, which was forwarded by the official number of the "Football Manager" game, and slightly teasingly matched with the "S/L Dafa" picture in "Football Manager".
However, the netizens in the comment area are still "sensible", pointing out that the rules are wrongly judged and the on-site staff is not aware of it, which is a completely different nature from the "S/L" in the game. The more poignant comment is that the technical team of "Football Manager" will not have UEFA's technical mistakes.
In the past season, speculation about the Champions League draw has always existed, and artificially creating topics will indeed help the Traffic Harvest of the Champions League. But the "conspiracy theory" on the Internet about UEFA 'setting the schedule' in advance is equally difficult to justify. Even if you really want to cheat, there are many alternative means, such as "hot and cold balls" and "light and heavy balls" methods, which are not difficult to implement, and there will never be embarrassing scenes of public overturning.
In 2016, former FIFA president Blatter broke the news that there was cheating in UEFA's draw at some events, and the principle was "refrigerator ball".
"I remember it was a European tournament where there was a team whose opponents were arranged by the top and I remember it was a team from Italy. I am a witness, and usually the draw guests will decide the match situation through the small ball of the draw, and this small ball is actually catty. Some balls have a high temperature, and some balls have a low temperature, and the people who draw lots can easily find the balls they want. Blatter told the media at the time.
Instead of blaming outsourced software vendors and "conspiracy theories," another logical possibility is that there is nothing wrong with the software, but there is a mistake in the field input data, causing the software to give the wrong calculation result. The on-site staff did not correct the error at the first time, which eventually led to the stage of the lottery funny incident.
But in any case, UEFA's interpretation has not lifted its credibility crisis. The fermentation of the lottery oolong incident on the Internet has also earned enough heat.
On Twitter in Spain that day, the number of "Champions League lottery" entry tweets rushed to 132,000, which is very exaggerated for a country with a population of less than 47 million. At the same time, the teams involved in the mistakes, such as Manchester United and Villarreal, also entered the "hot search".
In the Italian section of Twitter, in addition to the terms "lottery", "Manchester United", "Champions League" and so on, another term that has been brushed into the "hot search" from time to time since April, "Cheferin's dismissal", has also reappeared in the "hot search".
Because of the European Super League incident, the recent relationship between Real Madrid and UEFA has been poor. Yesterday's draw further deepened the contradiction between the best clubs of the 20th century and UEFA. Real Madrid, which had originally planned to "fly to Lisbon", drew the powerful Paris in the re-draw. Due to the "technical mistake" of the first round of the draw after the results of Real Madrid vs Benfica were announced, Real Madrid once opposed the re-draw of all the matches, but to no avail.
Afterwards, Real Madrid's foreign relations manager Butragueño publicly said that the Champions League draw was "regrettable".
UEFA's crisis of trust does not stop at the draw
In the end, the big Paris was drawn, and the upper draw changed to the lower draw, and Real Madrid expressed its dissatisfaction with the UEFA lottery incident, but also said that it would not appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but would try to prepare for the battle.
But at the same time, some members of the public's dissatisfaction with UEFA did not only stem from the lottery incident, but only with the help of the incident.
In the past two years, UEFA has unilaterally decided to introduce many policies, from the restructuring of the Champions League plan, the replacement of 5 people in a single game, to the cancellation of away goals, the establishment of the European Nations League and the European Association Cup, to the attack on the European Super League at the expense of political forces, and the public opposition to FIFA's World Cup restructuring plan. The promulgation of this series of major decisions has not fully considered public opinion, nor has it achieved self-justification in public opinion.
Among them, there is naturally no shortage of well-received policies such as changing 5 people in a single game, but there are also controversial policies such as the abolition of away goal rules, the European Association Cup, the National League, and the handling of European Super League events.
And, years of controversy over fiscal fairness policies and the scale of their penalties have made UEFA more like a vested interest in a corpse vegetarian meal than an impartial manager and organizer. UEFA President Ceferin has not been able to lead by example, for example, during the epidemic, in addition to fighting the European Super League, there is no effective financial bailout for small teams. While calling on players to reduce their salaries, they first gave themselves a salary increase, which was also exposed by the media.
As UEFA's ace event, the Champions League is still the number one football tournament at the competitive level. But such an amateur mistake in the lottery has also caused great controversy.
Perhaps at this moment, UEFA needs to wake up to the fact that "the collapse of any dynasty starts from the inside".
Note: The images used in this article are from the Internet