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 “The chairman of the LLDC, owners of the London Stadium, has resigned after an inquiry was opened into the soaring costs to the taxpayer to run the venue.” The Guardian “Tottenham have now lost each of their ties at the national stadium – they were beaten 2-1 by Monaco in September”. The …
By Tony Attwood There are two things we know about players who have played for Barcelona. One is that they have been in a club that engaged for multiple years in child trafficking. The second is that they employ or have employed a number of players who have been found guilty of tax fraud …
Read More “Alexis’ time at Barcelona catches up with him as he is accused of tax fraud.”
By Tony Attwood On 2 September we bade farewell to the great Arsenal Transfer Index – a listing of all the players we could find who were allegedly leaving the club or coming to the club. In our final analysis we noted 115 incoming transfer rumours – almost all of them wrong 22 players who …
By Tony Attwood If you want to skip my chit-chat and usual rambling just scroll down the page, the video is below. But if you have a moment to spare, do consider this…. Driving home from Heathrow Airport last night I heard someone on BBC Radio 5 announce that his “worry” was that Arsenal treated …
By Bulldog Drummond Seems there is a bit of a debate going on about Arsenal’s line up today with Mr Wenger being at his most enigmatic. We know that Monreal, Cazorla, Bellerin and Walcott did not travel. Mr Wenger said of the two last named players “both are ‘more or less’ injuries”. I’m not …
Read More “Ludogorets Razgrad v Arsenal. “Our destiny lies in the minds of the players””
By Tim Charlesworth So here it is – November. Halloween brings genuine horror for Arsenal fans, because the day after Halloween is November 1st and that is something for us all to be scared of. Every year I convince myself that November is an absurd irrational superstition, and every year it delivers on the horror. …
Read More “Here comes November: a time of horror or success for Arsenal?”
. By Fishpie To enjoy: to derive pleasure from, or take delight in, an activity or an occasion. And with the first-quarter stage of the season now completed, we’ve seen 15 competitive occasions in which Arsenal have endeavoured to play great football for us to enjoy. They’ve endeavoured and, in a good proportion of those …
Read More “Seeing the positives at Arsenal has been easy, so far”
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader of Untold, you may have noticed that of late I have been trying, in my normal bumbling manner, to point out ways in which newspapers deliberately mis-represent events in the game. At the start of the century there was the tale that Arsenal got more red …
Read More “Arsenal always do worse than everyone else in November, and other myths.”
By Fear N Panick There was a very strange comment made during Sky’s programme covering Sunderland v Arsenal. Niall Quinn told us, “It’s not the fan’s fault.” An interesting perspective, not because I think Sunderland’s predicament at having appointed a man who a week before his appointment said “the jury is still out on Ozil”, …
Read More “The Football journalists education programme. A public service commentary.”
by Bulldog Drummond The first bread slicing and wrapping machine in Britain was installed in the Wonderloaf Bakery in White Hart Lane, right on the boundary of Tottenham and Wood Green, in 1937 and was used to create the Wonderloaf. It was a white sliced loaf with all the natural goodness removed to produce something incredibly …
Read More “Wonderloaf v Arsenal. The preview, the teams, the stats, the score and the bland bread.”
By Tony Attwood There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Or so it is said (although usually without any data to back up such a claim). Ask a statistician however and he/she will tell you that there are statistics used properly and statistics used improperly or with incomplete data. Football, sadly, is fully of …
Read More “Why CIES data ranking clubs by the average age of their signings is not all it seems”
By Tony Attwood One of the things that fascinates me is that many people who pontificate on football (as I admit I do) often don’t look at the home and away form of the teams playing each other. I think that if one does that one can begin to make more realistic predictions about …
Read More “Arsenal to change the line up for Sunderland game: the tactical preview.”
By Tony Attwood The Telegraph is currently running a “Fan happiness index” via which they ask “Which Premier League club has given its supporters reason to cheer, or be sad?” It’s all invention of course – the bloke behind me in the east upper will be Very Very Angry every time Theo doesn’t put in …
By Blacksheep On Tuesday night I went to watch the Arsenal play Reading in the Football League Cup (the cup that is officially so uninspiring it hasn’t attracted a sponsor this season). I was out of the country when Arsenal beat Robin Hood Athletic away and what with the hectic schedule of work and domestic …
Read More “Reading in the library: watching the EFL cup from the posh seats”
By Tony Attwood You might recall a little piece I wrote about the outrageous allegations in the Telegraph about empty seats at matches at the Emirates. Using faked and misleading photographs the paper tried to make out that vast swathes of the ground were vacant during matches – even though the article admitted the number …
Read More “Empty seats at the Ems? You should try the Tax Payers’ Stadium!”
By Tony Attwood (and his French-English dictionary) It was back in August that the website Tribal Football came up with the headline “REVEALED: Usmanov ponders selling Arsenal stake and buying into Everton”. It was an article with the usual stuff about Mr Usmanov being “frozen out” of Arsenal, and no mention that he has been …
Read More “Alisher Usmanov makes his move – and it is not the one predicted.”
By Tony Attwood If you ever spare a moment to read the anniversaries that are posted on the home page of this site most days (occasionally I forget or the technology goes wrong – normally I blame the latter but the former is usually the real reason), you might know what is coming up. Because …
By Bulldog Drummond As you will know perfectly well (so I am not quite sure why I am telling you, but I’ve started so I will finish), we are in a 12 match run without defeat; a run that now has nine wins and three draws. Here is how it goes… 1 20 Aug Leicester …
Read More “Arsenal vs The Spectacles. The teams and other stuff.”
by Tony Attwood We’ve got so used to having youngsters break through into the first team from the youth sides that it seems almost inevitable that we will have another such player this season. Another Bellerin, Coquelin or Iwobi. Or looking back a bit, another Ramsey (who came aged 18, and then did loan spells …
Read More “All the young dudes – but which one is this year’s breakthrough kid?”
By Tony Attwood Way back, ten years ago in fact, the Daily Mail ran the headline (28 September 2006): English football ‘most corrupt in all Europe’ It was a theme Untold took up, but with a twist, for we have often argued that the corruption that is part of football is there not just because …
Read More “The gross incompetence of England’s football authorities exposed, once again”
By Tony Attwood TV money funds the Premier League. Not just Big Time, but Very Big Time. OF course if the TV companies started to lose interest in the Premier League, then nothing would happen much at the start as the TV companies would be forced to continue to pay for live programme rights they …
By Tony Attwood Whenever Arsenal have a few duff games the cry goes up about the need to buy more players and spend more money. And yet, as I have tried to point out before, only a minority of players become a significant success very soon after a big money transfer. The figures suggest that …
Read More “How are some of this summer’s big value transfers doing thus far? A case study”
By Tony Attwood Last year I passed a few hours examining how various teams’ league positions compared with their position in terms of how much money they spent in the summer on players. I’ve waited until nine games have gone this season, but now I think it might be time to see how …
By Tony Attwood Poor Sky. Poor Sky commentators. (I think one of them is Niall Quinn, the other Rob Hawthorne). Come to that poor Guardian reporters. Goals are not goals unless the referee gives them as goals. And then the goal is followed by a kick off by the other side. In the centre circle. …
Read More “Inattentive journalists and pundits totally bemused by the notion of offside”
By Tony Attwood There is a little bit of a debate going on about the issue of empty seats at the Emirates, and how unfair it all is that some people have season tickets and then don’t show up for games. The suggestion is that such people should have their season tickets forcibly removed by …
Read More “Manipulative, misleading and ill informed: the debate over empty seats at the Ems”
