Untold Arsenal: Supporting the club, the manager and the team
"I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art." A Wenger
By Sir Hardly Anyone As we know Arsenal has the youngest set of first team players in the League. But who has the costliest? The Football Observatory has just produced a chart showing how much each team in the Premier League is currently worth. So it is not recording how much each club’s players cost, …
Read More “The big six are still the big six when it comes to squad values”
by Tony Attwood It is time to return to the fraught issue of tackles, fouls and yellow cards. If all was equal, then there would be a common ratio between the number of tackles that would result in a foul being called, and the number of fouls before a yellow card. If all things were …
Read More “Why WHU can foul 3 times as much as Brighton before getting a yellow card”
By Tony Attwood I have regularly argued that the football media in this country regularly refuses to tackle certain issues, such as the oddity of the way refereeing is organised in the Premier League, and issues of corruption. Instead the media use the “gaslighting” technique of turning the conversation to something else in order to …
Read More “Tim Sherwood, football management’s grand failure, says Arsenal are no good!”
By Tony Attwood One of the great problems within football is the problem of gaslighting – the refusal by those who talk and write about football to engage with certain issues. Indeed on this site you’ll find a six part series on gaslighting in football reporting concerning the refusal even to engage in discussion concerning …
Read More “Is football seriously corrupt? It depends on your starting position”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Here’s a strange statistic. For six of the seven league games played this season, Arsenal have put out a team younger than any other team used by any other club in the Premier League. For the only exception to this approach this season Arsenal put out a team that was notably …
Read More “Arsenal are constantly putting out the youngest team in the League. Is that a good idea?”
Although measuring the results of games from the start of the season is ultimately what matters – obviously at the end of the season – measuring the last ten games as well as all the games so far this season, can give a better vision of where the team is vis a vis the rest …
By Bulldog Drummond Slowly, very slowly, others are catching on to the fact that if one wants to know how teams really are progressing one doesn’t just measure results from the start of the season to the end, but rather if you really want to know what is going on you should also take a …
Read More “Brighton v Arsenal: the teams and Arsenal’s progress since Christmas Day”
By Bulldog Drummond Brighton and Hove Albion joined the Football League with the creation of the Third Division after the first world war, moving with most of the Southern League First Division clubs into the 3rd Division, which then after one season became the 3rd Division (South). There they stayed until they won the league …
Read More “Brighton v Arsenal: the history between the two clubs”
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal really do seem to be at the bottom of the Premier League for injuries! According to the Premier League injury site the ranking is (and for a change I shall move from the bottom to the top) Arsenal: 1 Tottenham Hotspur: 2 West Ham United: 2 Brentford: 3 Leicester City 3 …
Read More “Brighton v Arsenal: the injuries and the tackles / fouls / yellow ratios”
by Bulldog Drummond First up, an apology. The apology should be given by Tony, but he’s currently hiding under the sofa, far too embarrassed to come out. The fact is Tony proclaimed to a fanfare of trumpets and associated brass instruments the fact that across the last ten league games Arsenal were the second most …
Read More “Brighton v Arsenal: an apology, last 10 games, home and away, transfers”
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader you’ll know that we have become quite interested in the level of fouling that different clubs engage in – and the way it is treated by referees. Thus we have been analysing not just the number of fouls that clubs commit but how many fouls a …
Read More “How Chelsea were brought back to the average by European refereeing.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It seems like several hundred years ago that some fans gathered outside the Emirates to protest at the ownership of Arsenal, with multiple calls for the Kroenke family to remove themselves from the club forthwith. That protest movement, fully supported and to a degree orchestrated by AFTV seemed to be very …
Read More “What difference would it make if Daniel Ek and Thierry Henry took over Arsenal?”
by Tony Attwood I’ve spent a little while wondering how to write a review of “Over Land and Sea and Lockdown” by Darren Berry. And in wondering and pondering, the fact that there are two utterly different ways of looking at football sloshed me in the face like a wet kipper on a cold night …
Read More “Over Land and Sea & Lockdown: Arsenal 2020/21. Book Review”
By Tony Attwood As we know, the media find it impossible to admit that Arsenal are doing well. They couldn’t take the notion that we were the second best club in the last two thirds of last season, nor that we doing rather well in recent matches played Nor can they take it that Tottenham …
Read More “Why can’t the media admit Arsenal were wonderful on Sunday?”
by Tony Attwood The battle over Super League rumbles on, with the six English clubs that were part of the scheme, still having failed to remove themselves from the organisation set up to run it. Meanwhile a legal case continues ducking and weaving its way around various European courts – claiming that Uefa is a …
By Tony Attwood There is a little article in the Guardian today. It is by Daniel Harris. He has apparently written two books, On The Road, a journey through a season (currently unavailable through Amazon – although that doesn’t say much as most of my books are the same) and one on cricket. And he …
Read More “Knock, knock. How a newspaper publishes two anti-Arsenal pieces in one day”
It must be great being a technical director. You join a club, they give you a mobile phone and a budget of millions, then say go forth and multiply our playing squad. Of course, the role itself is a little bit more complicated than that, simply because the business of buying and selling players …
By Tony Attwood A couple of years back we ran the article d “How a club can commit the most fouls, but get the fewest yellow cards?” and it started a series of investigations into tackles, fouls, and yellow cards in the PL. We continued this last season and our summary of all of last season’s …
Read More “WHU don’t get yellow cards like Arsenal; but how are they getting away with it?”
By Tony Attwood Across the last 10 games played Arsenal are second in the league Pos Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Liverpool 10 8 2 0 26 7 19 26 2 Arsenal 10 7 0 3 14 13 1 21 3 Manchester City 10 6 1 3 24 9 15 …
Read More “Across the last ten league games, Arsenal are second best in the Premier League”
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal have not been beaten by Tottenham in any of the last 28 games against them at Arsenal stadium – 11 of the games have been draws and the remaining 16 we’ve won. But we have not had consecutive wins since 2014. However we usually score – in fact we have scored …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham the team and some of the more interesting records”
By Bulldog Drummond Yesterday we did some of the heavy statistics comparing Arsenal and Tottenham. So let’s go to the other extreme and look at the sort of story that can emerge when one just says things because, that’s just about all one can do. For this approach of course it is always a good …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: looking at the history of Tottenham’s trophies”
By Bulldog Drummond Last season we analysed how referees treated Arsenal and found that PGMO tended to give Arsenal more matches with referees who consistently penalised the club with yellow and red cards, and fewer matches with referees who bucked that trend. We also began to analyse the links between tackles, fouls and yellow cards, …
Read More “Tottenham and Arsenal: do the refs treat us equally?”
By Bulldog Drummond We might still be languishing more than half way down the Premier League table six places below Tottenham Hotspur having had the worst start in Arsenal’s history since the birth of the Messiah… Team P W D L F A GD Pts 7 Tottenham Hotspur 5 3 0 2 3 6 -3 …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: what stats could make people think Arteta is a bad manager?”
By Bulldog Drummond I normally run the league table of injured players from the most injured to the least but let’s for once try this the other way around and look at the clubs most able to keep their players fit… West Ham United: 1 Arsenal: 2 Chelsea: 2 Leicester City: 2 Crystal Palace: 3 …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: the injuries and 10 years results under 3 different managers”
By Tony Attwood The argument is being made in some quarters that with its debts out of control football is at last trying to start controlling its finances. This means there is a move toward reducing its insane spending and costs instead of believing that it is always possible to screw more money out of …
Read More “Football’s new world order – not spending everything you don’t have”
