Champions league draw odds

Brussels Sprout

So apparently this morning's Champions league last 16 draw was a carbon copy of the draw that they held last night. I'd imagine that this is highly improbable but I'm not exactly sure of the odds.

Would it be 8!=40320

or 40,319/1?


(just in case people aren't familiar with the format. There are 2 pots of 8 teams. Ties are created by randomly drawing teams from pot 1 with pot 2)


Edit: I just realised that teams from the same country can't be drawn against each other nor can teams who qualified from the same group be paired together so that should reduce it somewhat.

Brussels Sprout

Ok I'm going to have a stab off this. So with the group constraint each team can only possibly draw 7 of the teams from the other pot

This is then reduced further when we add in the national constraints.

So for the teams from pot 1:

Man United can only draw 6 teams from pot 2 (not Arsenal or Galatasary)
Barcelona can only draw 5 (not Celtic, Madrid or Valencia)
Malaga can only draw 5 (not Milan, Madrid or Valencia)
Juventus can only draw 6 (not Milan or Shaktar)
Bayern can only draw 7 (not valencia)
Dortmund can only draw 7 (not Madrid)
Schalke can only draw 7 (not Arsenal)
PSG can only draw 7 (not Porto)


So this is going to be pretty hard to calculate since a team drawn from pot 2 may or may not reduce the choices for the other teams in pot 1.

One estimate (I think is) 6*4*3*3*3*2=1296

or 1295/1


Would be interested to hear other's thoughts on how to approach this

Skinnykenyan

know nothin about odds but sky quoted it as being 5000/1... wouldn take everything sky say to be true

28064212

I'm pretty sure it's dependent on how UEFA set up the actual pots. Remember, they don't do a "draw, replace if it's not a legal tie". The pots are set up in such a way that illegal ties can't happen.

pointywalnut

Just wrote a program to calculate the number of possible draws and I got 5463 possible draws, taking into account the restrictions of Country and Group

keith16

There are some restrictions on the draw.

Teams from the same country cannot meet.

Teams that were in the same group previously cannot meet.

So taking united as an example, they could not meet Arsenal from the second pot (same country) or Galatasary (as they played already in the first round).

Barca are also a good example. They could not meet Celtic (same group), Real Madrid or Valencia (both same country) from the second pot. Therefore, they could only meet 5 different opponents from the second pot.

Brussels Sprout

pointywalnut wrote: »

Just wrote a program to calculate the number of possible draws and I got 5463 possible draws, taking into account the restrictions of Country and Group

Could you post the code? I'd be interested in seeing the logic

Brussels Sprout

Seems to be quite a few answers swirling around the internet from 1679/1 as calculated by William Hill, 5000/1 quoted by the Sun and 2 million to 1 (lol) by some statistican quoted by ESPN

pointywalnut

PM sent with code

Neil3030

People do know that the odds quoted by bookies are linked to but not actually the probability of an outcome taking place, right?

Regading the figures of 1679/1 and 5000/1, are these the prices quoted by bookies, or are they actually 1/1679 or 1/5000 probable outcomes (n.b. not the same thing).