Untold Arsenal: football news from an Arsenal perspective

The “100 years of Arsenal in the first division” series now has its own page here.

• New book “exposing” Arsenal’s cheating is itself pure fantasy and lies
• The index to the series about how Arsenal supposedly only had a budget of £40m for transfers is now listed under The AAA page.

Publications

“Woolwich Arsenal, the club that changed football” is the definitive history of Arsenal from its inception as a league club through to its first year at Highbury, and reveals dramatic elements of Arsenal’s early days that have never been revealed before.

“Making the Arsenal” is a journalist’s inside view of the events around Arsenal’s collapse in 1910 and the rescue that paved the way for the move to Highbury and the arrival of Herbert Chapman.

Both books are now available on Kindle and in print.    Please see here for more details.

This daily blog was started in January 2008, and as the name is intended to suggest we try to cover issues that do not get fulsome coverage in other blogs or publications, and where we are covering the same ground as others, try to do so from a different perspective. A list of the most recent articles is given on the right under “Recent posts”.

Among the many campaigns and research projects we have run across the years I’d probably pick out these as being of interest…

160 games analysed – in which three researchers analysed the first 160 games of one PL season from the point of view of referee errors, and presented the evidence in videos.  It is a project that has, as far as we know, never been attempted or replicated anywhere else.  However it was picked up by the BBC and their report is included in this page on Corruption.

The Untold Banner: a group of readers of Untold who supported what we are doing, liaised with Arsenal FC, and raised funding, so that a banner of our choosing could be erected at the Clock End of the ground.  The video of Match of the Day focussing on our banner is now shown on that page.

The 25 player rule and the drive to allow fewer foreigners into the Premier League has long been the agenda of the FA.  But we undertook the research to see if countries that have done well on the international stage have followed the FA’s desired approach of banning foreigners, or whether there was another factor at play.  It turn out that there was indeed another factor involved.  The fairly simple research that established this was first published in Untold in 2010 and has since been republished (without acknowledgement) in the Daily Telegraph in August 2013.  The Guardian has also picked up on the theme.

We are not the most injured club revelations. For many years it was asserted in the mainstream media that Arsenal under Mr Wenger suffered more injuries than any other club in the Premier League.  It was a tale often repeated, but without any serious evidence.  So we undertake the investigation that no one else seemed to want to do.

Be careful in wishing for new owners

The Emirates Statues.  Tony Attwood (publisher of Untold) had a meeting with Ivan Gazidis at Arsenal soon after the Emirates Stadium was opened, and was asked what could be done by the club to make the ground feel more like home to the Arsenal fans.  I suggested that erecting a set of statues of famous players, along with one of Herbert Chapman, outside the ground.  That Chapman statue, I said, should be facing the ground with Chapman looking up at the stadium as if to say, “I created this.”

Arsenal’s history.  This part of the blog became so huge it had to be moved to a site of its own.  The Arsenal History Society site now has around 2500 articles, many arranged into sequences to tell the full story of different aspects of Arsenal’s development – many of these pieces including original research that has not been published before.

Untold Social.   This is a series of articles on issues that are outside of football, but which writers for Untold found interesting.  They include articles on how to avoid paying parking fines, how to lose weight without cost, how to get every job interview you want, and ways to help your children discover their talents.

Untold Dylan

A blog daily review of Bob Dylan songs, his concerts and the sources that he uses