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
The ABSOLUTELY DEFINITIVE TRANSFER FORECAST……..Don McMahon Over the last few weeks there has been a plethora, a veritable flood, nay a cataclysmic deluge of transfer speculations, myths, rumours, inventions, fantasies, prevarications and almost depraved dreams overflowing the fetid media sewers about Arsenal’s incoming and outgoing players. I decided that I’d verify, using my well-honed and …
by Tony Attwood A couple of days back we ran the story that Arsenal were to appoint an Aussie Rules guru as new director of high performance. Now with the computer keys barely cooled after typing all the details of that story it seem there is another change at the club as we are appointing a …
Read More “Second major change to Arsenal’s key staff announced”
Introduction If you have been a regular reader of Untold you will know the strong link that exists between Untold Arsenal and Arsenal Belgium. Walter Broeckx from the region around Antwerp joined the Untold team of writers in our early days, and has gone on to establish the referee review programme that we …
Read More “Celebrating our links with Arsenal Belgium: the annual report.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone According to the Great Transfer Index that Untold is once again running this season with the latest additions we have now got 19 players leaving the club. This is of course not as bad as last summer when the total got to 22 by the end of the transfer window. …
Read More “Latest news on six players leaving Arsenal this season, making it 19 departures in all!”
by Billy “the dog” McGraw There is something rather odd, and indeed rather quaint, in the notion that Arsenal would sell one of their best players for £25m – a fraction of his value – and that the player would transfer to a club that apparently seems to be offering him a lower salary than …
Read More “What do you do when your sponsor runs out of food? Revealed: the Barça Fantasy Factory”
By Tony Attwood They have been banned from signing players because of child trafficking. Their star player is under investigation for tax fraud, and so has said he’s never going to play in Spain again (as in “I didn’t know I had to abide by their laws, just because I played in their wretched …
By Sir Hardly Anyone. It looks like we have had a bit of an effect what with our reporting that only 3 in every 100 transfer rumours actually happen for I see it is being quoted elsewhere! Perhaps as a result of our reporting (or perhaps it is just a coincidence) there is a change …
By Tony Attwood I know I should be thinking of some brilliant and insightful commentary about Arsenal to end the day, but I got distracted by Guernsey cows, and thinking of the times in my youth I spent on the island (see the commentary to the article Arsenal to appoint Aussie Rules guru as new director …
By Tony Attwood One of the unsung benefits of Mr Wenger signing a two year deal, is that it gives the club plenty of time to set up some changes to the staffing ready for the manager who will take over after Mr Wenger departs. This can be particularly beneficial for, as Manchester United, Manchester …
Read More “Arsenal to appoint Aussie Rules guru as new director of high performance”
By Tony Attwood Of course Untold doesn’t have the resources to do its own original research into many of the stories that circulate in football but we do have friends in Europe who forward articles that appear in European papers. Articles which are studiously ignored in the British press. And it was from these that …
Read More “Gotcha: Infantino revealed as being as bent as those he replaced at Fifa”
By Tony Attwood . The Observer has an article today headed “The transfer hunters: how Premier League scouting set-ups compare”. A range of writers from the Observer and Guardian have each taken one or two clubs and given a quick run down of how things are going in terms of bringing in new talent. The …
By Tony Attwood Yesterday’s article How Arsenal fans are being duped over the purchase of a striker made the point that there is not always a direct relationship between having the top scorer and winning the league. A number of correspondents queried this, although I was not able to publish all of them since some came …
Read More “How many times has top scorer in the Prem League actually won the league title?”
By Tony Attwood I am always interested in the way in which a manipulated statement of fact can be used to try and show up Arsenal in a bad light. Interested because normally the examination of the details tends to show the writer, rather than Arsenal, up in a bad light. You may recall my …
Read More “How Arsenal fans are being duped over the purchase of a striker.”
By Tony Attwood I wrote a little while ago answering the point that what Arsenal needed was better attackers, pointing out that in fact we had only scored nine fewer goals than Chelsea through the course of the season, and so on its own this hardly seemed the complete reason why we came fifth and …
Read More “Revealed: the secret that will allow Arsenal to win the league next season.”
By Tony Attwood In February 2002, my colleague Anne, made reference to one Julio Grondana in an article in Untold in which note Julio Grondona as the head of the Argentine FA since 1979 and who is FIFA’s senior vice-president and head of its finance committee. As Anne said, “here is the man who has …
By Tony Attwood As you may know, if you are a regular reader of Untold, there are certain themes within football that we particularly like to cover: the quality and bias of refereeing, the way the media both define what is important and what is not and then comment upon it as if they were …
By Tony Attwood As others have pointed out, the forthcoming season’s league fixture list has not been kind to us. First off there is the issue of what happens after the Europa League matches on Thursdays, with us playing on a Sunday. After the first Europa match we have Chelsea away After the second we …
Read More “Why Arsenal really need a full-blown second XI in the coming season”
By Tony Attwood “Kylian Mbappe sends out clear sign he’s Arsenal-bound with brand new Aaron Ramsey-inspired hair” Yes apparently he has died his hair blonde and it looks like Ramsey, even though the two players come from an utterly different heritage. And that is a genuine quote from a bloggetta. Compared to that, “Arsenal are …
Read More “Why Mbappe is in, and why it don’t matter if Alexis is out”
By Tony Attwood The notion that other clubs move at speed in the transfer window and Arsenal lag behind, unable to complete deals, arguing about contracts, not flying out to see the player when that would swing it, allowing other clubs to hijack transfers – all of this is at the very heart of the …
Read More “Are Arsenal really much slower than other clubs in getting the signings they want?”
By Sir ‘ard Lee Anyone It is looking embarrassingly as if the journalists and bloggetta scribbers have shot their bolts, using up every viable rumour all in one burst and now leaving themselves with nothing to scribble about in terms of who is going where and when. However help is at hand because starting tomorrow …
By Tony Attwood Welcome once more to the mighty Arsenal Transfer Index – the 11th edition of the 2017 version. The number of players Arsenal are buying is how up to a giddy 57 – and we still are 16 days away from the window creaking open. As for the leavers 16 players out …
by Tony Attwood OK are you ready for a real conspiracy theory? Try this one. One of Untold’s valued overseas correspondents sent over a report this morning concerning the fact that for a United Arab Emirates game against Thailand the UAE demanded of Fifa that they change the referee, because the referee came from Qatar. …
By Sir Hardly An’yoné I have discovered that some silly people have taken to laughing at my name, and so I have decided to change it by adding an apostrophe and an accent. Please take note. It is now pronounced An Yo Ney. Now the news. 1: Arsène Wenger is pushing forward with an overhaul …
By Tony Attwood One of the amusing things about the bloggettas is that they are still running little articles about Arsenal having a desperate shortage of defenders (according to one piece today) or midfielders or centre forwards or whatever takes their fancy. Indeed the notion that everything can be reduced to simplicities has caught on …
Read More “Supposing we cull 10 players to meet the “25” limit, what sort of squad do we have?”
By Tony Attwood, based on “L’avenir s’annonce radieux” in the Swiss newspaper, Le Matin. As you may know, the UK media has a general agreement not to comment on Fifa corruption matters, at least until they explode, for two reasons. First because doing so might damage the image of the FA and the national teams, …
