By Tony Attwood
Ever since I was first aware of World Cups in football, I have seen people complaining about the third/fourth placed play off match that inevitably follows the semis. “Why do we have such a game?” people ask, or they would do if you were close enough to hear them. Or at least I imagine they ask, when they have nothing else to ask. “Why not let the sad losers just go home?” they might also say, if given a chance.
But fortunately we now have Talk Sport to tell us, saying. “Losing in a World Cup semi-final is extremely painful – but nations are given a chance to play one more time to claim third place.”
I don’t find that very convincing but if you do, it is on July 18. I think. And presumably will be full of players who didn’t get much of a run out in the real thing. Including Declan Rice, I guess, who, given the way the FA do stuff, will now get injured. Don’t do it Dec!
But I know that is not a very convincing argument, is it? The real answer of course, is money. Fifa want every single penny (cent or whatever other currency you want to count in) out of the WC, and so they throw in the extra match. But here’s the good news. You don’t have to watch. In fact, you don’t have to take any notice of the WC at all. Because in just 14 days, Arsenal are playing on 1 August 2026. The game is Girona vs Arsenal. Kick-off is at 7pm. (Girona is a historic city in north-eastern Spain within the autonomous community of Catalonia, according to Google). It might even be on the tele.
So yes, there is one more WC game for the four semi-finalists, but you really don’t have to take any notice of it, because although Untold will mention odds and ends about that remaining game, most of the focus will be on the opening game of the new season and any new players we have russled up by then.
Girona didn’t really have too wonderful a season last time around, even though it was their 96th season, and their fourth consecutive season in La Liga. The problem was that they ended up 19th out of 20 clubs in the top league and so dropped down to the Segunda División (I’ll leave you to translate that phrase yourself).
But the main point is that football is not far away, and we can now go back to focusing on imaginary transfers.
Now just in case I had missed anything I have just (at 0752 BST on 16 July) typed into Google “Arsenal transfers summer 2026” and top of the list got “Arsenal transfers: All the ins and outs in 2026/27 | News” which clearly led to the official Arsenal site. Clicking on that I then got
404 – Page Not Found!
Sorry, the page you are looking for does not exist.
Now this could be rather worrying news for anyone who has paid for his/her season ticket, but I am hoping that this is just one of those internetty glitchy things and life will be restored in due course.
But for now, making things up at my end, I think we can be pretty sure Leandro Trossard went to Besiktas, although it is a bit of an exaggeration to say “The transfer has cleared squad space” as ReadArsenal says because we didn’t have 25 players listed last season and thus the squad space already existed.
However, we still seem to be stuck on the opening transfer of Julián Álvarez from Atlético Madrid, but maybe that will be sorted soon. But it could well be that bringing players through from the academy is now Arsenal’s main focus, and so we are being told that the youth goalkeeper Remi Lupinski has signed a pro contract at the age of 17. He started out at MK Don’s academy and at 17 joined Arsenal on scholarship terms last year, having previously been at MK Dons’ academy. He played just under a dozen times for the under-18s and was the backup keeper in the FA Youth Cup games last campaign.
Anyway, lots of the names that have been around for a while will now all be coming leaping back onto webpages now we know that England are not winning the World Cup. But the Standard is now very excited about the bid for Christos Tzolis that they are talking up. It’s “imminent,” they tell us.
He originally played for Norwich and has played on the wing for Club Brugge, and he has quite a bit of experience having started out with 42 games for PAOK, 27 for Norwich City, then getting loans at Twente and Fortuna Düsseldorf and finally settling with Club Brugge, for whom he has played 74 times. According to BBC Sport, the price is about £30m.
So internationals over, now it’s transfers, and then soon it is friendlies. It’s all go!
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