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 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 …
By Bulldog Drummond As we have often noted, the constant negatives run by the media against Arsenal, constitute a prolonged and deliberate attack on the club. The media does it because…. well, the rest of the media does it. Like smoking or taking heroin, it becomes a habit. Such has been the case with Arsenal, …
Read More “How the media is manipulating supporters’ thoughts before the Cup Final”
By Bulldog Drummond Only two teams left active so in many ways the injury table doesn’t matter any more. We have six and Chelsea four. However for once we are not top – Newcastle are on seven, presumably one of which is the illness of disappointment after the possibility of becoming the richest club in …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea injury news and surprising away form stats.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone. The Toppled Bollard is back open and the chickens are headlessly stumbling towards where the bar might have once been before it was locked down. And headlessly seems to be the right word as we read the headline from Tribalfootball that “Arsenal hero Nicholas urges Arteta to cull three players.” Mind …
Read More “Arsenal to slaughter 3 wild animals buy 11 players and keep one.”
By Bulldog Drummond And so we approach the cup final. Transfermarkt has an interesting table showing the number of players in the squad of each team and the total market value. Club Squad Foreigners Total market value Manchester City 34 27 £908.69m Liverpool FC 29 21 £903.29m Chelsea FC 33 23 £747.86m Manchester United 33 …
Read More “The value of the Arsenal players, and the Arsenal team”
By Tony Attwood It was particularly interesting to receive a fair number of comments yesterday following my review of the CAS findings on the Manchester City case. Not as many as we normally get, so many the subject of the Uefa and CAS reviews of their financial affairs is now considered done and dusted, although …
By Tony Attwood You may have noted a few of the sarcastic and critical comments posted on Untold following the Court of Arbitration in Sports findings in the Uefa v Manchester C appeal. I made the point a few times that the secretive nature of the CAS proceedings (something that does not happen in most …
Read More “CAS reasons for siding with Manchester City make interesting reading”
By Tony Attwood In 2019/20 an Arsenal player was given a yellow card for every 4.9 fouls the team committed. In fact Arsenal had to commit fewer fouls than any other club for each yellow card they got. The size of the difference between Arsenal and other clubs can be seen by the fact that …
Read More “The shocking statistics on how referees have affected Arsenal’s league position”
This is part two of the article Will spending money work for Arsenal this summer? And if not, then what? which appeared earlier today. For Arsenal the most obvious thing to do, in order to progress up the league next season, is to look at the number of draws this season and turn just a …
Read More “Spending money (part 2): Arsenal’s biggest problem and how to solve it”
By Tony Attwood This is part one of a two parter on the options for Arsenal this summer. Let’s start with money spent on transfers. Here’s a table that shows the top spenders a year ago… Aston Villa £146.3m Manchester United: £144.7m Manchester City: £138m Arsenal: £132m Everton £110m What is self-evident is that the …
Read More “Will spending money work for Arsenal this summer? And if not, then what?”
by Tony Attwood You may recall that I have been making a bit of a fuss about the way the English media will not, seemingly as a matter of policy, cover events relating to Fifa which have been bubbling away throughout this year. The Americans are threatening to ensure that companies registered in the USA …
Read More “Fifa in chaos as Infantino’s illegal meetings revealed and chief Swiss lawman resigns”
By Tony Attwood Carefully ignoring the fact that there is still one match of the domestic season to go (some sort of cup final I believe) the Daily Mail has a piece asking its journalists “10 key questions” about the season. It’s quite interesting generally, and I thought I would highlight a couple of bits, …
Read More “Disappointments this season, hopes for next season: the journalists’ vision”
by Bulldog Drummond It’s one of those funny end of season games where a has to beat b unless c loses to d by six or more goals and e has a goalless draw. Or something. If Villa win, Watford need to better their result by two or more goals to survive on goal difference. …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford. The teams, and BT Sport goes bonkers.”
By Bulldog Drummond There are some real odd issues that are arising from the league table as we approach the end. Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Liverpool 37 31 3 3 82 32 50 96 2 Manchester City 37 25 3 9 97 35 62 78 3 Manchester United 37 …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford: why are Arsenal still getting so many injuries, 2 years on?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The Toppled Bollard, home to the journalistic elite who day by day invent transfer tales of which just three percent per annum are true, is once more fully open. Journalists are all wearing face masks decorated with their favourite slogans (“Get in there” is the most popular) and spend their hours …
Read More “The ten (sorry six) (sorry 3) big big stories about next season’s Arsenal team.”
by Tony Attwood One of my prime concerns is how the history of Arsenal is regularly wrongly written in the media, invariably in a way which reflects poorly on Arsenal, suggesting that in the early part of the 20th century it was a club run by crooks. For example, as I have mentioned earlier this …
Read More “Still getting Arsenal’s history wrong, after all these years”
by Tony Attwood It was back in April, just a few weeks into the corona virus, that we first raised the issue of how people could be stopped from celebrating around a club’s stadium after a trophy was won. Since then we have had three nights of mass gatherings in Liverpool and several nights of …
Read More “Liverpool and Leeds knock back chances of stadium return for next season”
By Tony Attwood Last season Barcelona became the biggest earning operation in football, up 22% on the previous year pulling in €840.8 million in that year. Around 10% more than Real Madrid. They had money everywhere. What could possibly go wrong? One could have asked a supporter of AC Milan, the third-wealthiest club in football …
Read More “When spending a fortune in football can go seriously wrong”
By Tony Attwood Two headlines caught my attention. One read, “Seven times Arsenal tried to ‘lowball’ clubs in the transfer market” and the other was, “Latest Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang update is not good news.” The two headlines come from one article within which the story is simple. Arsenal continuously muck about in transfers, pulling every silly …
Read More “Are Arsenal really the bad boys of football, as some want to suggest?”
By Tony Attwood One of the features that links together most blogs and I suspect all the newspapers and their websites, plus the TV stations and the radio stations, is the importance of transfers. We can see this at once from the fact that they spend so much time each summer on transfer rumours, 97% …
Read More “Why the media all want Arsenal to buy buy buy, and why we shouldn’t”
By Bulldog Drummond In the injury charts Arsenal are still right up there at the top with seven alongside Newcastle and Leicester. Every other club has fewer. As mentioned before, in the days of Mr Wenger he was blamed repeatedly by a couple of eccentric commentators, and their views were taken up by the media …
Read More “Aston Villa v Arsenal; why all these injuries? the corruption of 2013; the team”
By Bulldog Drummond Aston Villa are in what we experts call “a mess”. Since lock down Villa have played eight games and won just one of them – beating Crystal Palace 2-0 at home. Indeed five of their eight lockdown games have been at home and the results of those other than that single win …
Read More “Aston Villa v Arsenal, how did last summer’s spending work out for each club?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone, transfer correspondent of the Rutland Water Gazette. If you are a reader of the AISA Arsenal History Society website you’ll know that after the takeover of the club in 1910, the aim was to make the club self-sufficient, which had always been the intention of those who founded the professional club …
Read More “How Manchester City have helped fund Arsenal over the years”
By Tony Attwood It has been a very, very long time coming, but suddenly, after the wins against Liverpool and Manchester Money the talk has all been about Arsenal’s brilliant players. Rather than a tedious array of 120 players Arsenal are supposedly trying to sign (and here’s a question – how many staff on transfer …
Read More “Buying more players is exactly the opposite of what Arsenal need now”
By Tony Attwood There is an ongoing clamour to buy some more players, and indeed the latest Untold chart of players tipped to be coming to Arsenal this summer is now running at 122. But there’s a problem with this, apart from the fact that even the best of new players can take a year …
Read More “Where next for Arsenal? What leaving the EU is going to mean for our squad.”
