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 I just got a post on my phone titled Big Topic Discussion: “What an ideal transfer windows for Arsenal will look like?” It’s not too hard to translate it into grammatical English however, so we can get the rough idea of what they wanted to talk about. This statement came from AFC …
Read More “Football’s big problem: cash flow, transfers, collapse of sponsors, piracy, everything…”
by Sir Hardly Anyone “The six players Arsenal must sell this summer to give Mikel Arteta the squad he needs” is a challenging headline. Six? I mean really six? More than half a squad??? All sold at once??? Of course, some of them might be youngsters or players who are already out on loan, but …
Read More “Is this a real attempt to undermine Arsenal, or just whacky gibberish?”
By Tony Attwood As we noted yesterday, the USA is about to go onto the attack against Fifa (see USA is about to attack Fifa in the biggest assault on bribery in football ever) But in doing this it is also going on the attack against Qatar and its winning of the right to hold …
by Tony Attwood Investigation teams in the USA have now stated that the three decisive votes for the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar were subject to a wholesale process of bribery and corruption. It is what most of us have concluded all along, but of course, the level of proof demanded by …
Read More “USA is about to attack Fifa in the biggest assault on bribery in football ever”
by Tony Attwood If there have been any central themes on Untold during the corona virus outbreak they could probably be best summarised as a) Football in England could well be in a dire mess because many clubs have no reserves to allow them to survive a crisis. Indeed it seems unlikely that when the …
Read More “Arsenal v Liverpool. How the two clubs are treated so differently by the media.”
By Tony Attwood Very, very slowly newspapers and online commentators are starting to think – if this all goes very wrong, some clubs could lose a lot of money. They are not yet asking “And then what?” but it is a step in the right direction. And when we start looking at how much money …
Read More “Clubs are much closer to the edge than you might think.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone To be fair to the termites who write this stuff, the volume of transfer rumours is down considerably on the last three years. But since the grown ups are spending their days simply wondering which club is going into liquidation first, it all seems a bit odd. Arsenal of course are …
Read More “Despite financial fears, Arsenal to sign 42 players”
by Christophe Jost The fallout of the pandemic is far from clear, we have no idea how bad it will be, yet there are some things that will change forever. Like there was a before and after 9/11, or a before and after Bosman. Football will never be the same. Untold appears to be the …
Read More “This is the end, my Arsenal friend, this is the end”
By Tony Attwood This story is jumping from newspaper to newspaper in England, and seems to have originated in the Athletic. The Mail, Sun, Standard, Mirror all have it, although interestingly the heavyweight papers such as the Guardian, Telegraph and Times don’t run it. Their last comment was from last month when they said …
Read More “FIFA to allow each country to extend season and transfer window as it wishes”
By Tony Attwood The problem we have is that everything is interrelated. The problem we have is a lot of people expect it all to be sorted out, “because it always is.” Those two statements may seem completely separate but they are in fact part of a single big difficulty that is arising in relation …
Read More “Just because the media says this will soon been fixed, doesn’t mean they are right”
By Tony Attwood I have several times raised the point that the media hates the question “why?” And so it seems today as none of the main news outlets in the UK are asking why the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care said that he wanted footballers to take pay cuts and thus …
Read More “At least this time, the media can’t attack Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood The way the media has reported football’s issues during the current crisis has been desperately slow and illogical, They started out by continuing to report potential huge money transfer fees, while suggesting that this issue would all be over shortly, and seem to have now got to the position of saying that …
Read More “Fake news vs fake hope. The crazy battle that is going on for football”
By Tony Attwood “Why should players take a pay cut?” That’s an interesting question, but because that question begins with “why?” you can be sure that it doesn’t get much coverage in the media. For the British media is notorious for ignoring the “why?” in any debate. What they do is skate over issues, and …
Read More “I object to some of my tax payments being used to pay staff at Liverpool FC”
by Sir Hardly Anyone We’ve now got 36 players being tipped to be coming to Arsenal, with enormous sums being suggested, just at a time when Arsenal has had its most expensive transfer window ever, and along with the rest of the Premier League is facing an unprecedented financial challenge. Some of the stories are …
Read More “The 36 players now tipped to be joining Arsenal and an unexpected departure”
by Tony Attwood Uefa is bringing pressure to bear on European leagues by suggesting that any leagues that do not complete their 2019/20 fixtures may be excluded from the Champions League and Europa League for next season. This follows the decision by the Belgian League to abandon the 2019/20 season, and declare the league table …
Read More “In desperation, Uefa’s “TV Solution” is being considered”
by Don McMahon There are many dire and some less morbid predictions being mentioned by the desperately understaffed media as to the future we face as a human collective. Some media figures like the Muppet in chief in Washington, are inventing their own future based on their most recent brain-fart. Others, whose intellectual gifts and …
Read More “The shape of things to come: a north American view of the aftermath that is to come”
By Tony Attwood So this is where we’ve got to. 1: By and large the players in the Premier League, following the lead of their union, are refusing to take pay cuts. Some very public players in Europe are taking pay cuts. 2: Clubs are laying off lesser paid staff, and telling them they will …
Read More “Football is now in deep crisis, and it is hard to find a solution”
By Tony Attwood and Christophe Jost So we have had weeks and weeks of pretending nothing is happening, or if it is happening it is only those silly foreign people getting into a tiz, while we English know that it is all alright, and indeed it would all be fine in Europe if only those …
Read More “Top earners take no cut; media attack, gambling firms lose money”
By Tony Attwood Daniel Levy, (Mr Tottenham), has suggested that Premier League players and managers should accept lower pay. The club has also placed 20% of its staff on furlough. This is the sort of thing that Untold has been predicting through this crisis, while the blogs and newspapers have been outshouting each other with …
Read More “How the richest men in football are telling the poorest staff to take pay cuts”
By Tony Attwood Journalists in general rarely apologise for getting things wrong – and when they do it is generally only when forced to. Football journalists go further; they simply don’t ever admit they were wrong. In fact they make it up as they go along, and then ignore any protests about the fact that …
Read More “How lazy football journalists make it up to meet their own requirements”
By Dr Billy “the dog” McGraw, chief psychologist at the University College Hospital of the North Circular Road. The dismissal of nine players by FC Sion has taken on a particular importance in European football, as much of the continent is now watching to see how things begin to shake out, following the “interesting” behaviour …
Read More “What really happened to Song and Djourou at FC Sion”
by Tony Attwood In part one of this series The 10 ways football is changing as a result of the virus: part one. – we looked at salary caps and the notion that clubs could turn on Manchester City and their endless supply of capital. Now here are a couple more ways in which football …
Read More “The 10 ways football is changing as a result of the virus: part two – Chelsea / Kroenke”
By Timothy Cassidy For 29 games, Liverpool have played some of the best football we have ever seen. Until the post-Christmas break, it was hard to even imagine them being beaten. Of course, time, fatigue, injuries and well-organized and motivated adversaries eventually lead to their one league defeat having also only drawn one match (in …
Read More “Liverpool deserve to be recognized, just not as league champions”
By Tony Attwood 1: Salary caps in the Premier League Across the world, but most particularly in Europe, clubs are getting into a financial pickle, largely because a) they have no money coming in from sponsors, gate receipts, broadcasting, advertisers and the like, but b) they are still paying their players. This might be a …
Read More “The 10 ways football is changing as a result of the virus: part one.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Well yes, there is a growing awareness that civilisation as we know it has come to an end, and there is no football being played. But we still have a bunch of bananas writing in the national newspapers and associated websites and they are determined to pretend that everything will start …
