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 Mikel Arteta insists Arsenal are in a “good place” – but he may have overlooked problems “…more injuries could rock the boat and Granit Xhaka’s knee injury – expected to keep him out for the rest of the calendar year – is a warning for Arteta.” That is the opening of …
Read More “Has Aretea really overlooked a key problem at Arsenal?”
By Tony Attwood There is an article in the Guardian “VAR still a work in progress so expect more controversy and occasional fury” by Barry Glendenning which (obviously) takes a look at the issue of VAR this season. In the midst of this article, the author turns to criticising commentator Richard Keys, and in so …
Read More “Behold: the first admission in the national media that there is a referee problem”
By Bulldog Drummond The headline in the Daily Mail expresses the media’s attitude: “Time to ban Hungary thugs”. Their article opens, “The Football Association vowed to launch an investigation and file a report to FIFA after racism from Hungary fans marred yet another World Cup qualifier with England and they were also involved in violent …
Read More “Why does the media always excuse the FA when there is chaos at a match?”
By Tony Attwood The thesis that underpins this website is simple: there are many football stories of interest that newspapers and broadcasters will not touch. Plus many more that might be mentioned briefly but never in depth. And because these stories vanish from the media, are trivialised or indeed never appear at all, they don’t …
Read More “The hidden problem within football is that problems remain hidden”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Arsenal’s summer transfer window was an utter disaster… for the pundits. With 136 players highlighted as being ready to be signed by the club, only a handful made it. Meanwhile with every single player in the first team squad headlined as being in line for a transfer or simply a give-away, …
Read More “Arsenal’s key transfer targets for January 2022 revealed – and you won’t believe it!”
By Tony Attwood Apologies for the delay in publishing this article. This was due to a technological failure requiring immediate action on my part. Or put it another way, my glasses broke and I had to go to the opticians to get them repaired. But now on with the show… In Britain today a seemingly …
Read More “Why do many believe that vaccination can harm, while few believe that refs are biased?”
By Tony Attwood The general consensus is simple: Newcastle United is now the the richest football club in the world, Of course it is not their own money earned by having a big stadium packed with fans (as per Arsenal’s 1930s model) or a world-wide marketing system (Manchester United’s approach in the 1960s). No instead …
Read More “Why the world’s media is alarmed at what the Premier League is now allowing”
By Tony Attwood There are a number of issues floating around the issue of Newcastle’s purchase by Saudi Arabian forces. Some affect football as a whole, as we have seen, another is that there is opposition to the move within English football, and the other is that the financial structure of English football is out …
Read More “Could it be that Newcastle’s success isn’t quite as guaranteed as some imagine?”
By Tony Attwood There is an article on the Premier League website under the headline “Find out how the awards for players, manager and goal of the month and season are decided.” However you might not want to spend too much time there as there is no clue as to how the debates go, only …
Read More “Mikel Arteta is a worthy manager of the month, but the media can’t say why”
In July 2017 Stan Kroenke announced that he was bringing his bloodsports TV channel “My outdoor TV” to England. We covered the issue in a number of articles on Untold at the time. Untold didn’t get nearly as upset as some people did in relation to the issue, but we did say that we would …
Read More “Compare: Kroenke blood sports TV channel and Mohammed Bin Salman on human rights”
By Tony Attwood So now we have another club with access to more money than is imaginable, while we have a controlling body in terms of Fifa, meandering around attempting to fine Arsenal £34,000 because of what it felt was a misuse of sell-on clauses in contracts. But there is a wider problem here. In …
Read More “Football is absolutely not sustainable like this: here are the six crash points.”
By Tony Attwood Obviously Newcastle United are not the first club to have been bought either by a state, or by a person with access to the massive funds of a state. Although it is probably the first club to be bought and then generate the lines in a national newspaper: Infuriating tracksuit vendor v …
Read More “What does the purchase of Newcastle by Saudi Arabia mean for Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood We’ve discussed Saudi Arabia before. And there is now a certain irony that of all clubs being taken over by Saudi Arabia the one selected is the one most closely associated with beer. It’s illegal in Saudi Arabia. But maybe if this rule is applied to Newcastle United once the Saudi takeover …
Read More “Suddenly Saudi Arabia is being allowed into Newcastle”
By Tony Attwood This article continues from “Why do we keep pointing out errors in what the media says” ——————- Here is an interesting thought, published in the Guardian in an article headlined, “Are Burnley a rough team? Their red card record suggests not.” The piece makes the point that their last red card was …
Read More “How gaslighting excuses Burnley’s tactics, and knocks Arsenal’s reputation”
By Tony Attwood In the last article Have Uefa and CAS finally had enough of club trickery in avoiding FFP? I reported on the way that Uefa and the Court of Arbitration in Sport seem to have had enough of the way Manchester City are using the rules in order to escape punishment in the …
Read More “Here’s a turn up: CAS are supporting Arsenal against Fifa”
By Tony Attwood This article answers the question raised in the July 2020 article “What will Uefa and the clubs that obey FFP do now that FFP has been wrecked?” In recent months and indeed years both Uefa and the Premier League have required that Manchester City hand over documents and give information that is …
Read More “Have Uefa and CAS finally had enough of club trickery in avoiding FFP?”
by Tony Attwood “Scoop” recently wrote a comment on this blog relating to our regular pieces on what some of us consider to be wholly misleading articles in the media about football. Scoop expressed the opinion, which is often heard here, that “calling it out here is not going to change anything at all, and …
Read More “Why do we keep pointing out the errors of what media says when everyone knows?”
By Tony Attwood I have often noted that European commentators on football have a vision that goes far beyond that available to English sports commentators. Indeed I can’t imagine too many publications renaming the idea of the holding of the World Cup every two years into “Biennial World”. Nor can I imagine them running the …
Read More “Biennial World: Europe unites in opposing the commercialised bi-yearly world cup.”
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”
