How much money raised by the FA in the names of charities goes to charities?

by Tony Attwood If you have been reading Untold for a while you may well have picked up on the fact that one of our bêtes noires is the Football Association, largely because of its willingness to spend public money without accounting to the taxpayers who give it, while ignoring the fact that the House of …

The whole football system seems to exist only to protect and enlarge itself

By Tony Attwood The Premier League has said it will take action in the Manchester City case if any of its rules have been broken.  Uefa (now under new management since the Manchester City scandal was initiated) has said that it could go back and look again at the 2014 FFP investigation.  This is a …

Reiss’ great record, loanees done great, transfers that won’t happen, international insanity

by Tony Attwood Let’s open with a nice piece of news: Reiss Nelson has scored six Bundesliga goals this season. No non-German player has ever reached six Bundesliga goals at a younger age. Actually it wasn’t a bad weekend for our loanees: Matt Macey played for Plymouth as they won 1-0, David Ospina played for Napoli …

Renaming Manchester City to make it sound more in keeping with its sponsors’ activities

by Tony Attwood According to Amnesty International, Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owners are “brazenly trying to “sportswash” their country’s “deeply tarnished image” by pouring money into the Premier League club.” And indeed given the level of support that Manchester City has, their success in the league, and the utter reluctance or perhaps inability of any …

Arsenal player wins Women’s PFA player of the month

Arsenal Women’s Nobbs wins October Women’s PFA Bristol Street Motors Fans’ Player of the Month Award  Arsenal Women FC’s Jordan Nobbs has been voted the October Women’s PFA Bristol Street Motors Fans’ Player of the Month by football fans across the country. In a tightly-contested vote, run by fan engagement experts Snack Media, the England …

How personal gratification and a desire for profit create the negative feel at Arsenal

By Tony Attwood According to the banners and the chants when Mr Wenger left and a new manager was found the fans wanted and expected to get “our Arsenal back”.  Quite what that Arsenal was, was never made clear, but the chants of the away support at Fulham suggested that was the Arsenal they wanted …

Arsenal v Wolverhampton team news and the need to avoid corners

by Bulldog Drummond Mr Emery has been talking about the evolution of Arsenal under him and the way in which the game against Liverpool showed the direction he was taking the club in terms of the power within the team.  “Our idea is to repeat matches with this pace over 90 minutes,” he said. “It …

Arsenal v Wolverhampton and what to do after Danny’s injury

By Bulldog Drummond The terrible injury to Danny Welbeck has highlighted another aspect to the growth in players running down their contracts.  Danny, like Ramsey and Cech will be free to leave the club this summer and find themselves a new club to play for. But of course if the player gets a serious career …

Arsenal v Wolverhampton: the form, predicting the score, and the last time we played them

By Bulldog Drummond As we saw against Crystal Palace analayses of home and away team performances don’t give an exact indication of how a match will go, but over time we have found they are one of the very  best ways of making predicitons, and are more often right than wrong. So despite the failure …

Which teams are benefitting most from referee decision making this season?

By Bulldog Drummond As we saw in Gordon’s super-analysis of referee actions earlier this week, Arsenal have inflicted the need for treatment on the opposition 11 times this season while Wolverhampton have inflicted the need for treatment on opposition players 5 times.  So we shouldn’t have too much worry about fouls from them resulting in …

Danny’s out, but how does that affect our immediate chances?

By Bulldog Drummond Only one place to start the preview series for the Wolverhampton game and that is with injuries; we are virtually top of the list.  Danny is of course the latest to go on the list – details from Physioroom as always. Who? What? Back? So? Playing? Welbeck Ankle Injury No Date “Significant …

How Infantino, now head of Fifa, fixed FFP on behalf of PSG and Man City.

By Tony Attwood At the heart of the story that has been revealed by the hacking of emails concerning Financial Fair Play, Manchester City, PSG and Uefa, is the involvement of Gianni Infantino who is now the head of Fifa. It is a story that many, I suspect, will choose not to believe.  But before …

Which clubs inflict the need for treatment on others, the most? The weekend fixtures.

Game Day 12 – The Rememberance Day weekend. by Gordon Haverland Largely in rememberance of WWI and WWII. Matic has memories of a Balkin war that bothers him. Game Day 12 takes place over 2 physical days (Saturday and Sunday). On Saturday there is one early game, 4 games running in the middle time slot, …

Arsenal v Sporting: yes a victory tonight will mean we win the group, plus team thoughts.

By Bulldog Drummond Time to confess to an error – if Arsenal do win tonight they will win the group, because Europa league groups are decided on head to head results if points are equal.   Really, I did know that but somehow, completely forgot when writing the last piece.  And yes if you’d like to …

How the media was persuaded not to follow Man City / Uefa corruption story

  By Tony Attwood There is so much pouring out from the leaked documents concerning Uefa and Manchester City it is getting hard to follow it all.   But if we thought the complexity was why a lot of the English media has stopped running the story, we were wrong. The media have been directly complicit …

Arsenal v Sporting. Injuries, team news and options.

By Bulldog Drummond To begin with the injuries, we have five of them, while just three teams are above us on six.  One of them might not be an injury at all but is normally formally classified as a “slight doubt”. The man What’s up Return? Read all about it Sokratis Ankle Injury November 8 …

Arsenal v Sporting: how the opposition have been doing of late

By Bulldog Drummond There are so many stories queuing up for publication at the moment (including one about what the FA does with its charity money, a subject which Untold has been campaigning on for years) that it is hard for me to book a space to do the regular previews. But here we go …

Yet more Man City allegations, Etihad financial problems, La Liga puts complaint to EU

by Tony Attwood The latest round of suggestions of wrong doing by Manchester City takes us into an area that not only concerns Uefa and Financial Fair Play but also that rather tenacious leg biting dog: Revenue and Customs – the British tax collector – and a complaint from Spain to the EU.  It’s all …

The relative spending of Arsenal and Liverpool: across the decades

By Nitram Regarding the debate about the relative spends between Arsenal and Liverpool here they are running from Arsenal’s last Premier League win back in season 2003/04 up until last summer, season 2018/19. I have divided the review into two periods. Basically Arsenal’s 10 years of  austerity from season 2003/04 through to season 2012/13. Then …

FFP, Man City and Uefa. Some of the new allegations that are being reported.

By Tony Attwood This article continues from my earlier piece:  Did Uefa collude with Man City in an FFP cover up across the last four years? Both articles continue from the investigation we did four years ago which resulted in a series of articles, the last of which was  Man City decides to take on Uefa; the …

Did Uefa collude with Man City in an FFP cover up across the last four years?

  by Tony Attwood Now here is a turn up.   The Untold Arsenal Editorial Board (also known as that bunch in the corner of the Toppled Bollard public house, on the Rutland / Northants border, along with our friends in Switzerland and other exotic places) was very much of the opinion that “Financial Fair Play” …

Have Liverpool spent one third of a billion in three windows? Plus a brilliant headline from Falkirk

By Tony Attwood We have had a number of correspondents object to my view that Liverpool has spent more than Arsenal.   Two arguments generally have been raised.   One says our spending has been similar, and the other says that even if my claim that Liverpool spent a lot more than Arsenal that would be no …

Arsenal Transfer News: the weird and wonderful, and the tales of loanees

By Sir Hardly Anyone Apparently it is all known and all sorted.  Because Tony Cascarino has claimed Unai Emery will dispense with Mesut Ozil and Henrikh Mkhitaryan because they don’t suit the new-look Arsenal.  It’s possible although Cascarino has always puzzled me.  Being Irish I thought his name should be O’cascarin, but somehow the O got transmuted. …

How the superleague is being presented, and Koscielny to Barcleona

by Tony Attwood It is quite hard to draw a breath at the moment what with Arsenal doing quite well and the media besides themselves trying to bury their Arsenal visions of the summer and forget everything they previously said.  And indeed as the top teams apparently consider a breakaway, and the British government tries …

If Merson had any level of integrity he would now immediately resign

By Tony Attwood Paul Merson has, in recent weeks, become ever more frantic on Sky Sports, telling anyone who would listen that Arsenal are a complete shambles and that Liverpool would beat Arsenal by scoring at least four goals. This statement on last weekend’s Sky TV presentation was made amidst an outpouring that was one …