A cloud of anticipation is hovering in the city of Nylon, Switzerland where the draw of the first round knockout phase of the UEFA Champions league is scheduled to take place on Friday 18th December 2009. Another item in the agenda of the day is the draw of the UEFA Europa league round of 32 and 16.
As common with other UEFA draws in the past, club presidents and football managers have started arriving at the headquarters of UEFA ready to witness draw first hand.
The draw comprises 16 teams, which have been divided into two pots of eight each. The first pot contains the group winners while the other one contains the runners up. The group winners will enjoy the advantage of playing the second leg of the knock out matches at home.
Taking a keen look at the group standings, its quite evident that English and Spanish teams will not meet each other since all those teams in both countries topped their own respective groups.
Other rules to be observed indicate that teams that played each other in the group stage and teams from the same country cannot be drawn together. This means that football fans will anxiously wait to see which English or Spanish team may be drawn against an Italian or German team.
The following are the winner’s pot and runners-up pot in alphabetical order.
Group winner’s pot:
Arsenal Barcelona Bordeaux Chelsea Fiorentina Manchester United Real Madrid Sevilla
Runners-up pot:
AC Milan Bayern Munich CSKA Moscow Inter Milan Lyon Olympiacos Porto Stuttgart