By Tony Attwood

• The Arsenal Transfer machine starts rolling: the first dozen players we’re buying!
• Why do two of the bigger London clubs not have a full-on ground sponsor?

Two of the many headlines circling around this morning read, on the one hand, “Best in the world: David Raya has become Arsenal’s most important player” and on the other “Why Martin Odegaard is becoming a problem for Arsenal.”

And indeed it was ever thus.  The notion of support of one’s football team has now, for many people, become a game of negatives with the occasional bit of praise and positivity, which generally, when it is thrown in at all, is thrown in rather late.

The fact is that for many writers, telling the world that the manager has got it wrong and this writer knows better than the manager (who is incidentally, a professional with a lot of experience as manager and player) which players to buy and which to pick, is the norm.

But it hasn’t always been this way.   Originally, the blogs emerged to counter the raging negativity of the daily papers when it came to commentary upon individual clubs.  Yet somehow across the years the blogs have largely given up on such a mission, and instead now seek to outdo the mainstream media in raging negativity.

And it is not just one player or one blog that is running the story that Arsenal players are useless, and the manager doesn’t know what he is doing.  Consider in the same batch of headlines this morning that we also have, Get rid ASAP: Arteta must drop £50m Arsenal star who’s fast becoming the new Rob Holding.

Now the extraordinary thing is that in the early days of Untold, we were raging against the newspapers for running such tales while seeing the blogs as the real alternative to the mainstream media’s anti-Arsenal agenda.   Now sometimes it is the other way around, as we have the Mail telling us that “More space, more shots, more goals: How Arsenal’s Viktor Gyokeres and Kai Havertz forged an unlikely strike partnership – and why it can revive attack in title run-in.”

In fact, even the daily routine of listing players that Arsenal are going to buy this summer has been affected as we are now getting stories about the players that Arsenal are not going buy because they are too slow, and we are still over two months away from the next window opening (which is on 15 June in case you were wondering).

And this is important, because it does affect how some people see the game, and how players Arsenal want to buy see what it is like at Arsenal.   “Do I want to come and be insulted by my club’s own fans and the media?” they ask, and the answer is of course “no.”.

Yes, there is some positive news, although it can be a bit hard to find sometimes, such as when we are told that in the last Champions League game Declan Rice won possession 13 times during that one single game.   That seemingly was the highest number of possession gains by an Arsenal midfielder in a latter stage Champions League match since Mikel Arteta did the same thing against Bayern Munich, some 13 years ago.   A nice diversion from the moaning and worrying.  But really, there is more positive news than that out there.

Obviously, one of the big problems is that all the focus is on the current news, which might seem obvious given that we have things called Newspapers.  But the reality is that football is played across nine months of the year and much of the time, individual games don’t mean that much.   What means a lot is the cumulative effect.  Which is why we like to publish the league table from time to time.

Here it is, and this time we are, just for a change, just showing the London clubs. And just in case you have not noticed, Fulham, Tottenham and West Ham have let in over twice as many goals as Arsenal.  

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Arsenal	31	21	7	3	61	22	39	70
6	Chelsea	31	13	9	9	53	38	15	48
7	Brentford	31	13	7	11	46	42	4	46
9	Fulham	31	13	5	13	43	44	-1	44
14	Crystal Palace	30	10	9	11	33	35	-2	39
17	Tottenham Hotspur	31	7	9	15	40	50	-10	30
18	West Ham United	31	7	8	16	36	57	-21	29