by Tony Attwood The Daily Telegraph is a newspaper that supports the Conservative Party, wholesale. It could no more recommend its readers to vote Labour than it could suggest that in the next election the Workers Revolutionary Party offers a viable alternative to the current government. And yet, despite this, the newspaper can and will …
By Graham Jones Arsenal finished the 2019/20 season on a high by winning the FA Cup. They came from a goal behind to defeat Chelsea 2-1 and not only win a trophy for the first time since 2017 but also qualify for Europe. The fans and players would rather have qualified for the Champions League …
By Tony Attwood It’s another “Knock Arsenal” day in several newspapers. Here’s just one example… According to the Mail, one of several papers running the story of the Willian transfer, he will earn £220,000 a week at Arsenal. This gives him an cost of £34.32m over three years. There is nothing to pay for the …
By Sir Hardly Anyone The re-opening of the pubs has been good for publicans but bad for those people seeking some real live news of who if anyone Arsenal might sign, because as the pints keep on pouring down the throats so the names just keep on rolling out. Six more players to join Arsenal …
by Tony Attwood This piece follows on from “Fifa in chaos. England is silent but Europe is up in arms” We ended y esterday with Infantino not only being investigated for corruption in terms of Fifa and using Fifa’s money but also being investigated for incitement to treason. Infantino is meanwhile also trying to convince …
By Tony Attwood Fifa has just gone into the transfer business. In fact they have just brought in a whole new squad. A squad of new lawyers who claim that there is no suspicion of Gianni Infantino having done anything wrong, but rather that, for the good of Fifa, he needs defending against a rampant …
By Tony Attwood This article originally included a quote of the number of VAR events per game in the PL, with the wrong figure quoted. The error (totally mine – I blame sticky hands on the calculator) doesn’t affect the key argument that the PL games there is a much higher level of VAR corrections …
by Tony Attwood Jérôme Valcke is the former Secretary General of FIFA who was fired on 13 January 2016 as a result of allegations arising from the ongoing 2015 Fifa corruption case. Now I know it is difficult to keep up with all the various Fifa corruption cases, because there are so many but in …
By Sir Hardly Anyone Some days, being a glutton for punishment, I stare at myself in the mirror. And I ask why? Why do I bother to catalogue the doings of the inhabitants of the Toppled Bollard public house, home of the football journalist elite. I have below my ten stories of which the denizens …
by Tony Attwood In a recent article I asked a question about “why does no one dare let the image of football slip?” The point was that football is not about the game of football and the support of the club anymore. It is about selling products to people. Football, in fact, is only about …
By Tony Attwood By now we are getting used to stories of clubs approaching financial collapse, although few of these stories make much overall sense. Arsenal making their coaching staff redundant as a financial measure means nothing in the overall structure of the club’s finances, but it is presented as a financial solution. Selling Maitland …
by Christophe Jost For years, each and every time the discussion has addressed the subject of a salary cap, that such system would be totally illegal under EU law and thus the discussions were pretty much dead on arrival or rather dead before the discussions have even arrived.. Indeed now that League One and League …
By Tony Attwood Following the announcement about the breaking up of their scouting team, the media has been unsurprisingly quiet on the issue of what Arsenal are going to do about recruitment of young players in the future. Unsurprisingly quiet, because working out what Arsenal’s plan is means undertaking a little bit of research and …
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader you may have noticed our little campaign for footballers, supporters, club owners and workers to recognise that the stadia to be used in the 2022 world cup has been built by slave labour. Now since the whole origin of the Black Lives Matter campaign comes with …
By Sir Hardly Anyone With Arsenal having sacked their entire recruitment staff, the question arises, how are we going to find players any more? And the answer is that they don’t need to: the journalists and the bloggers will do it for nothing. When you think about it, it is obvious. The journalists spend all …
By Tony Attwood Football clubs, and to some degree football fans, tend to dislike change. I thought of this in writing a recent entry on the Anniversary Files on the Arsenal History Society website which celebrates the first penalty shoot out in England, which took place 50 years ago. That first penalty shoot out (which …
By Tony Attwood When Arsene Wenger left Arsenal the club had a magnificent chance to restructure everything. After all Mr Wenger had been at the club 22 years and because of his success record had the opportunity to create a club structure of his own design. Indeed it is said that once he sold Anelka …
By Tony Attwood As you might know, I have a fascination with the way in which football, and its many aspects are presented on the media. How the integrity of referees is never questioned, how the notion that transfer rumours (which are 97% wrong) come to be considered news, how the key issues of the …
By Tony Attwood One or two bits of the media in the UK have started to cover the incredible upheaval within Uefa, but where the UK media has taken an interest they seem to be playing down its importance, suggesting that it is all a bit of a storm in a very tiny teacup indeed. …
By Sir Hardly Anyone The greatest fear of the football journalist is that he or she should be out on his/her own when it comes to a story. With no one doing any proper research they are anxious that their inventions should be backed up by other media. Which is partly why every possible transfer …
By Sir Hardly Anyone There are some weird tales in the Daily Mail today. And they are so weird that even the word “weird” doesn’t seem to be enough. First, have this: “Sometimes, with Arsenal, it seems as if we have seen it all before. In this case, we pretty much have. In 2017, having …
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader of my ramblings you will know of my constant criticism of the English media that it ignores issues relating to Fifa. So when on 27 May 2015 seven Fifa officials were arrested at the Hotel Baur au Lac, Zürich, the English media were shocked. If they had read …
By Tony Attwood “Never let a trophy get in the way of the constant knocking.” That could well be the Daily Mail’s basic rule of thumb as Martinez, Holding, Tierney, Bellerin, Xhaka and Lacazette were each given six out of ten for their performances in the cup final. “Just above average”. It seems a bit …
By Tony Attwood So we have been in 21 finals, one more than Manchester United, seven more than Chelsea and 12 more than Tottenham. We have won the FA Cup 14 times, two more than Manchester United, six more than Chelsea, six more than Tottenham In a season in which we had a manager who …
By Bulldog Drummond In my earlier piece I looked at a run from 1960 to 1970, in which Arsenal’s form was truly awful. We might now contrast this with the spell from December 1995 to March 2004. That was a spell of 26 games in which we lost just two. Date Game Res Score …
