UEFA Champions League Draw 2012-2013, Part I

Every year, the world watches as UEFA kicks off the Champions League season with a draw determining the makeup of the Group Stage of the competition. The intent is to create balanced groups that permit the best teams from across Europe to advance to the knockout stages. There are 32 teams seeded and divvied up into 4 "pots" of 8 teams each Which pot a team is classified in is based on a combination of national league strength and UCL record over the last five years, with Pot 1 holding the strongest teams and Pot 4 the weakest They are randomly placed into 1 of 8 Groups - each group gets 1 team from each Pot Only exception is that each group cannot have more than 1 team from the same national league Because the seedings don't necessarily reflect the actual, current strength of the team, there are inevitably mismatches that create a lot of the drama and hype leading up to group play. Somehow, every year has a "Group of Death" that will include teams like Man City (Group 2??), Juventus (Group 3??). UEFA should really scrap the "last 5 years' performance" metric that completely don't take reality into account. Like Man City's meteoric rise from Qatari money. Or Juventus' suspension hurting them in this ranking. I suppose this is all part of soccer's drama. In any case, I'll be rating the chances of advancing in a follow up post once the draw is over in 'Part 2.' Here are the Pots: Pot 1 Chelsea Barcelona Manchester United Bayern Munich Real Madrid Arsenal FC Porto AC Milan Pot 2 Valencia Benfica Shakhtar Donetsk Zenit St Petersburg Schalke 04 Manchester City SC Braga Dynamo Kiev Pot 3 Olympiakos Ajax Amsterdam Anderlecht Juventus Spartak Moscow Paris Saint Germain Lille Galatasaray Pot 4 Celtic Borussia Dortmund BATE Borisov Dinamo Zagreb CFR Cluj Malaga Montpellier FC Nordsjaelland