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 Tony Attwood The top two divisions in Spanish football, which together are known as “La Liga” have sold 10% of themselves to the private equity and credit company CVC Capital Partners. The arrangement means that “La Liga” will get €2.7bn (which is currently about £2.3bn) and this is thought to be the first time …
Read More “The Spanish league sells part of itself in order to keep operating. But….”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal were ninth in the goalscoring table last season, which doesn’t sound that good – although maybe what you would expect that since we finished the league season in eighth place. But it perhaps is also slightly less ungood than you might imagine when you note that we only scored three …
Read More “How can Arsenal up their goalscoring this coming season?”
By Tony Attwood One of the arguments often made against articles published in Untold Arsenal is that the data that we have doesn’t prove that something odd is happening, or that something is amiss with the way in which football works. And generally speaking I agree. We don’t have the resources to prove that anything …
Read More “There’s no proof of corruption in the PL, it is just that some things are rather odd.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Journalists’ failure rate reaches a staggering 96%. Would any other industry accept such a level of failure? We know that the overwhelming majority of transfers that journalists and bloggers predict never come to pass. But sitting in the Toppled Bollard public house in Docklands, we began to wonder what actually happened …
Read More “What happened to the 134 players said to be coming to Arsenal last summer?”
By Tony Attwood There is a general perception that teams that do well, foul the least. But as Evelyn Waugh might have said, that is true “Up to a point” – meaning that actually isn’t really true. Some of the teams that did rather well last season, achieved their success in part at least by …
Read More “Behold: The dirtiest teams in the PL last season; and the one that were fouled the most”
By Sir Hardly Anyone On this page we have rumours number 65 to 124, making this now the transfer window with the most rumours ever since we started covering them about 12 years ago. What’s interesting is just how shameless this all is. The newspapers and websites that come up with these stories know that …
Read More “Arsenal’s 124 players we are signing this window: K to Z”
By Sir Hardly Anyone I noticed this little quote the other day: “The Arsenal management’s inability to manage the squad, manage transfers, and inspire trust is obvious to anyone watching.” (Just Arsenal). But given that there are now 124 players coming to Arsenal, according to the blogs and newspapers, surely the true quote ought to be …
Read More “Arsenal now tipped by all-knowing pundits to be signing 124 new players”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The media’s aim is to make Arsenal look stupid and to suggest that they (the media) know more than the lollipops running the club. It’s not a conspiracy, just a cheap way of filling the media space, and since the fans get little news from the club, this makes some fans …
Read More “The strange story of Leno, Martinez, Ramsdale and an out-of-work Spurs player”
by Sir Hardly Anyone The transfer window slams shut (please note it never closes, but it always slams shut) on Tuesday, 31 August at 23:00 BST. And currently rather a large number of clubs are getting rather worried for a variety of reasons. The problem is that of financial projections – which basically means clubs …
Read More “What’s gone wrong in the transfer market? In essence, everything.”
By Tony Attwood “I think we showed some really positive stuff and some worrying stuff when we gave the ball away in difficult positions, and when we had to do defensive organisation, it opened spaces in difficult moments. “For what we could do against that team and where we are in pre-season, I think it …
Read More “How “I think that was positive” was turned into “Arteta’s worried” by the media”
By Tony Attwood Throughout the last couple of months the media have kept up the incessant talk that all is not well at Arsenal and major reforms are now required to the playing squad, and quite possibly the backroom staff as well. Yesterday a 1500 word article on Arsenal appeared in the Guardian analysing their …
Read More “Newpaper reports show journalists’ failure to grasp what’s happening at Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood You may read that this was a 1-2 victory to Chelsea but actually Arsenal scored two perfectly reasonable goals. However, one was ruled not a goal because the ref, who was standing about 12 yards from the goal line, couldn’t tell if the ball had gone over the line. It had, beyond …
Read More “Arsenal 2 Chelsea 2 (Arsenal deducted one goal because of tech incompetence)”
By Bulldog Drummond So we return to the pre-season games after an interruption with the cancellation of the American trip, with the game against Chelsea. Despite the cancellation of the American meander we have managed to put in a few friendly games 13 July: Hibernian 2-1 Arsenal (Easter Road) 17 July: Rangers 2-2 Arsenal (Ibrox …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea: The Mind Series. Build up and the team predictions”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal have issued a notice stating that “ticket holders for Emirates Stadium that are aged 18 and over may be asked to provide proof of full vaccination (+14 days), proof of natural immunity (via a PCR test result) or a negative lateral flow test (taken within 48 hours of the fixture’s specified …
Read More “Chaos at the Emirates tomorrow? Arsenal demand vaccination or LF test.”
By Tony Attwood Back in 2016 the European Commission hardened its attitude towards clubs in the European Union getting “state aid” – which is basically illegal payments from governments to help them keep going. The most notorious cases involved seven Spanish clubs including Real Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia CF. And indeed the recent collapse of Barcelona’s …
Read More “How EU Foreign subsidy rules will harm football in Europe but boost PL clubs”
By Sir Hardly Anyone “Arsenal sign £50m Ben White and want Bellerín and Xhaka to extend contracts” announces the Guardian today (31 July 2021). How 8 Arsenal players swept to the top 20 table in Europe this month was the headline from Untold Arsenal on 21 May – which by and large was two months …
Read More “Could it be, after all this, that Xhaka might stay?”
by Tony Attwood That headline comes from the story in the Guardian, following a decision by Chelsea to introduce a control system from this weekend so that only those who are vaccinated twice or have a recent test are allowed into the ground. It is reported that the government is planning to make the scheme …
Read More “Vaccine passports to be introduced for attendance at football matches”
By Tony Attwood “The writer clearly believes there is a media conspiracy against Arsenal…” That was a comment made recently in relation to the article here which basically summed up the various statistical analyses we have been presenting through the summer. Issues such as the dramatic decline in yellow cards that Arsenal picked …
Read More “A conspiracy against Arsenal? Or a conspiracy against doing some work?”
By Tony Attwood It is oft said that there are always two sides to every argument. So while Jamie O’Hara in the Mirror has branded Arsenal a “mess” in a virulent attack on Arsenal’s perceived lack of transfers in the article on the summer transfer window I have been criticising the Mirror for its difficulty in …
Read More “How the media got Arsenal quite wrong last season – and will do so again in 2021/2”
By Tony Attwood An article in the blog “You are my Arsenal” appeared recently under the title “Winging It: Willian and the definition of insanity”. It includes the statement early on, “Willian’s performance in 2020 was more than inconsistent; it was non-existent. His lack of meaningful movement; his awkward attacking and defensive positioning; and careless …
Read More “The illusion that its all about the quality of the players is just an illusion”
By Tony Attwood This table shows the fouls committed by each team and the fouls that are committed against them. The final column shows the two as a percentage. If the number is over 100% the club fouls more than it is fouled against. If it is under 100% the club commits fewer fouls than …
This continues the list of all the players the media are telling us that Arsenal are chasing or who are coming to Arsenal this summer. Does anyone ever tell these newspaper and TV people that we can only take 17 foreign grown players in the squad – and we already have more than that? No …
Read More “The 116 players coming to Arsenal this summer part 2 Jules Kounde to Piotr Zielinski”
By Sir Hardly Anyone There is a certain extra caution in the air at the moment what with Smith Rowe re-signing for Arsenal, and an increasing edginess that the tales of the amazing Arsenal recovery in the last two thirds of last season are actually true, and there clearly is no intent to replace the …
Read More “The 116 players coming to Arsenal, part 1: Patrick van Aanholt to Tenu Koopmeiners”
By Tony Attwood In general terms the teams that commit the most fouls in the PL are those seeking to avoid relegation, which is not surprising. The teams that commit the fewest fouls are generally the teams that are pushing towards winning the league. The league winner isn’t always the team with the lowest foul …
Read More “Arsenal’s fouls dropped by 22% last season. Did it help?”
By Tony Attwood The key issues in the Premier League investigation into expenditure by Manchester City seems to be that Manchester City have resisted handing over documents to the League and to the arbitration panel, on the grounds that the League itself a) had no jurisdiction and b) the arbitration panel not impartial. If they …
Read More “The curious case of how the media treats Man C and how it treats Arsenal”
