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 Untold is unremittingly critical of the way TV, radio, newspapers, websites and blogs report football. You’ll know that. I’m personally very critical of the Guardian, because it gets much of the rest of its work on its blog and its printed editions right. And some of its football reporting is good too, …
Read More “Beyond the media; how to take back football from those who tell us how to think.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Before I go on, you might recall our little commentary about a story in the Metro about players Mr Wenger said he wasn’t selling, and then sold. Well, it has cropped up again on Sportskeeda – only to ensure that they are not doing for breaching copyright in the original article, …
by Tony Attwood Arsenal, as we all know, get the most injuries of any club playing in the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy. We know this because S Robson esquire and a guy who once coached Wales have told us over and over and over again. Now we are about to find out how …
Read More “Daily Telegraph reveals the true cost of injuries … or maybe not.”
by Tony Attwood There is an article in the Metro which is drawing a lot of attention. It opens… “As rumours continue to swirl surrounding Alexis Sanchez’s future, Arsene Wenger has been very clear that the Chilean [Alexis] is not for sale. But there’s a problem. He has taken that stance on countless occasions in …
Read More “Did Wenger really promise that Henry would not leave, and then sell him?”
By Tony Attwood We’ve now had four games in which Arsenal have been involved, which is enough time to give us an idea as to where the journalists are going to take the issue of Arsenal on TV, in the newspapers, and in the various bloggettas that newspapers have now set up to try and …
Read More “The five things we have learned about this season’s reporting of Arsenal, so far”
by Tony Attwood Arsenal now have two players out on loan with Marc Bola having gone to Bristol Rovers following the announcement of Takuma Asano’s continuation at Stuttgart. In terms of number of loans out Chelsea are in a league of their own. They already have 13 players out on loan already, and may beat …
By Bulldog Drummond 足球 (That’s football in Chinese) Chelsea’s pre-season has been rather different from that of Arsenal, in that aside from a match against Fulham held in secret (Chelsea reportedly won 8-2) they have not had a pre-season on the pitch. As we will see below they have had a pre-season in the office …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea – not really a friendly. The teams, and the transfers”
By Bulldog Drummond The media will always present games against Chelsea as a foregone conclusion: a Chelsea win – even though Arsenal have won the tie more often than Chelsea. “Ah,” they say (for they like saying “ah”) “that’s because of the 1930s. If you take recent results you will see Chelsea are way ahead.” …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea: the preliminaries, the food poisoning, the stories”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal didn’t do too badly when it came to the Africa Cup of Nations last time around – Elneny was called up to play for Egypt, but as he wasn’t seen as central to the team at the time, it wasn’t a departure that was keenly missed. But it hasn’t always been …
Read More “Cup of Nations to be moved; Man City in further tapping up allegations”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal used graduates from their academy more than any other Premier League side last season, a study by the Press Association has found – with the graduates taking part in a tiny fraction under one fifth of the Premier League minutes played. 6,628 of Arsenal’s total Premier League minutes – which to …
Read More “Arsenal’s use of academy players; club transfer comparisons; use of teenagers.”
by Tony Attwood A couple of days back, police in Spain say arrested Ángel María Villar Llona, the president of Spain’s football association, Real Federación Española de Fútbol, on suspicion of embezzling funds. It is an interesting move because Villar Llona is also a senior vice-president at Fifa and Uefa those two gloriously clean and untarnished organisations …
By Tony Attwood I must say I think Arsenal.com and via them the club as a whole did us all rather poorly over the match against Bayern. Licensed to an obscure channel through which one had to pay for a month’s football to watch one’s match, and know that they will put the credit card …
By Bulldog Drummond Bayern have played one friendly so far this summer – against Erlangen Bruck, a team that plays in the Landesliga Bayern-Nordost, the sixth tier of German football. Erlangen Bruck has a ground capacity of 1000, and they lost 9-1 to Bayern. As far as I can see other than that, this is …
Read More “Arsenal v Bayern Munich in Shanghai. The teams, the mind games, the TV options.”
By Tony Attwood Our correspondent in Switzerland has just come up with the calculation that the English players in the top level of the academy at Arsenal outnumber the non-English by two to one. The suggestion is that there is some serious forward thinking going on, judging by the way the transfer market …
Read More “Are we now in a two tier price structure when it comes to buying players?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone There have been three big events for Arsenal over the last three days: one good, one amusing, one bad. 1: Elneny On the good side Elneny has turned out to be a more than decent centre back. Since the media has been screaming about how we leaked goals last season conceding …
By Sir Hardly Anyone Things have slowed down a bit, not least because Arsenal has revealed their hand over who stays and who goes, through their selection of the 25 players to go on the Australia and China tour. Taking a player there and then selling him seems unlikely to say the least. Of …
Read More “The Out Index: the 26 (yes 26) players said to be leaving Arsenal this summer.”
By Tony Attwood TV money to Premier League clubs was 45% higher last season than in 2016/17, which explains why every club is, or is expected to be, buying players for prices never previously seen. In this regular column I try to keep tabs on where exactly that money is going – along with seeing …
By Sir Hardly Anyone There has been a major shift in the transfer rumours this past week. Suddenly we have stopped seeing the wild and wacky tales of signing a reserve keeper from Leeds when we’ve already got too many of our own. Likewise reports about Bellerin’s transfer request and his new house in Barcelona …
Read More “Suddenly the media all focus on the same man for Arsenal’s next transfer.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone This is part 13 of the Arsenal Transfer Index; the record of all the players that Arsenal are buying – and we know that it is true because it is in the papers and on the bloggettas. But are the Commentariat concerned they are overdoing things a bit? Not in the …
Revised at 2.50pm Tony Attwood has now been taken to lie down in a darkened room, and the revisions are produced by Dr Billy “the Dog” McGraw Squad details for the friendlies before the season begins won’t tell us everything that is going on in the manager’s mind, but they give us a few clues …
By Blacksheep I noticed a thread on Twitter the other day that interested me. One or more people were tweeting in reaction to Arsenal’s acquisition of the French forward, Alexandre Lacazette and changes to the backroom staff. Someone named @KennyKen1972 posted: AFC being seemingly active in this transfer window, apparent changes behind the scenes, funny …
By Tony Attwood OK, of course I don’t know who is going to win the league this year. But I just wondered what recent history might tell me. So I took a look at the last eight years, to see if that would give me some insights. Retention: In the past eight seasons no team …
Read More “Who is going to win the PL this year: what history and statistics tell us”
by Tony Attwood Suggesting that Arsenal has the most injuries each season of any Premier League squad still happens, but it is on the wane – maybe, just maybe, because we’ve been pointing out how wrong these figures are for years. Raymond Verheijen, a man utterly unqualified in the world of injury prevention and treatment …
Read More “Which PL clubs were most affected by injuries last season: you might be surprised.”
by Tony Attwood If you are a regular Untold reader you’ll know that we run the Arsenal Transfer Index which tracks all the players Arsenal are tipped to be signing this summer. The latest edition showed 70 players tipped to come to Arsenal, and 19 said to be leaving. For comparison last season the final …
Read More “Unlike the rest of last year’s top seven, Tottenham have signed no one. Why’s that?”
by Tony Attwood The comparative transfer table started about a week ago, and came about because I wasn’t sure that I had a full grasp of which clubs were the most and which the least active in football transferring. We all know that Arsenal were always accused of being “too slow” – and indeed rather …
Read More “Which clubs have been the most active in bringing players in so far this transfer window”
