Quote Originally Posted by talisman View Post
In my experience most of these 'fixed' matches seem to occur when the opposition manager does not attend.
I confirm that I have observed the same.

'The only way an unmanaged team can change is in response to changes made to the managed team' is when the game has decided that you will be knocked-out of the competition at this particular stage no matter what you do.

In those anomalous cases, nothing seemed to work in terms of changing the course of the round, that is who will be qualified and who will be disqualified. If ever you make very appropriate changes in tactics, you will dominate the match and your team will score a few goals, but the opponent will respond with more goals that seems to be too easy for them to do. The way your defence let them to come and score appear to be too strange. Even the behaviour of the GK is strange. In other words, it can be observed how the game set things up and make things happen on the pitch in such a way so that the desired final result (qualified or disqualified) is respected.

I still will leave a small room for the possibility of the opponent having gone through due to tactics (initially selected tactics), but I highly doubt it.