A newspaper's online football fans' forum was bombarded with comments after the Champions League draw was posted 90 minutes before it actually took place.

The fan site on the Liverpool Echo's website received a post at 10.28am on Friday from 'confused' – a member claiming a rumour was going round that the draw had been leaked.

The member correctly detailed next month's four quarter-final games in the Champions League and said no bookies would take their bets.

The post sparked a flurry of activity on the forum leading up to the live draw at midday and the inevitable cries of "fix" throughout the rest of Friday and over the weekend.

At the time of writing, 54 pages of comments have been placed on the Echo's fans forum.

Steve Harrison, content manager for Trinity Mirror's websites in the north west, said: "The fact that a full prediction of the Champions League draw appeared on our forum site well before the live draw took place in Switzerland is quite remarkable.

"We are investigating the circumstances surrounding this posting. As a result the site has experienced a dramatic increase in visitors."

Experts told the Echo it would be virtually impossible to manipulate the time of posting and a number of forum users said they had seen it before the time of the draw.