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 How many players do Arsenal have out on loan? It is not a difficult question, and I suspect that if you are here as an Arsenal supporter not only will you get the answer right you will be able to name the players The number is five and the details (taken from …
Read More “Chelsea and Man City dominate the loan system. But what is the point?”
By Tony Attwood I get sent a fair number of video links but rarely pass them on, because most other sites do that, and we are after all Untold. But this one from FFDTV is worth watching – all the way through. Here is what they say… Arsenal’s highly rated 15 year old Trae Coyle demonstrates …
By Tony Attwood What is it in football that makes corruption so likely? It is not just the large amount of money – that always causes problems in every industry, and not every industry is in such a mess as football. Rather, according to the Financial Times, it is the short termism in football. …
Read More “The 10 major sources of corruption and dubious practice in football”
By Tony Attwood International football is dying. It is a phrase that Untold wouldn’t use because the general view here is that it died a long, long time ago, and is now only kept alive by the corrupt and the gullible (see last few articles on this site). To support international football is to support …
Read More “International football is dying, and at last the media discover why.”
By Tony Attwood From time to time we get comments at Untold that the site’s operators in general (or more often, me in particular) are too smug and self-satisfied, endlessly talking up Untold as a crusader that gets things done. That’s not how I see Untold (not surprisingly), but I do find that I like …
By Tony Attwood As Walter pointed out in his article Taking on Fifa: How the Dutch FA has become the first to tell Fifa it has had enough Fifa is now facing legal action in the Swiss courts over alleged complicity in the mistreatment of migrant workers in Qatar. The writ argues that “Swiss law, and …
Read More “At last Fifa being taken to court: what the legal case claims.”
By Tim Charlesworth Congratulations to the leader of a red army who has managed to stay in his job for a surprisingly long time. I speak, of course, of loyal Gooner, Jeremy Corbyn, who has been re-elected as leader of the Labour Party. Despite having been a Conservative candidate in the 2001 General …
By Tony Attwood It has long been noted that people with an agenda will re-write history to fit their message. Thuat the aaa notoriously re-write Arsenal’s history to show that this is a bad time in Arsenal’s history. Football journalists and their chums in the FA rewrite the England football teams history to make out …
Read More “There is a big problem in Britain with not seeing our history honestly”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal’s next four games are something of an oddity – for they are all at home: Swansea Ludogorets Razgrad Middlesbrough Reading Swansea and Middlesbrough, our league opponents, sit next to each other in terms of their league fortunes just now. Here’s the table with the final column showing the results this season …
Read More “What is likely to happen in Arsenal’s next four games?”
By Tony Attwood It may seem strange that the FA, whom we know as an organisation that will willingly crawl on all fours to lick up the droppings from the grand table of Fifa, might actually consider pulling out of internationals, but that is exactly what they did in 1934. Not all internationals I should …
Read More “On an interlull weekend let’s remember when the FA contemplated stopping internationals”
By Tony Attwood If you have been reading the referee reports this season you will know that the Untold referee review team has expanded its work quite considerably. As a result in the reviews this season we have included these two tables: Table 9: Major Wrong Decisions Against Teams Table 10: Major Wrong Decisions in …
By Sir Hardly Anyone One of the things I have noticed is that the further north you get the slower the information travels. Thus they are still dealing with the last transfer window in Birmingham, as the ReadWestBrom web site tells us “West Brom made a late bid to try to sign Portuguese winger …
Read More “Arsenal make first signing of the next transfer window!”
By Tony Attwood Goodness it is difficult running a blog during the interlull. I mean you try and enter the news desert with some good back up stories ready to roll, but even so you are dependent on some sort of news coming in to keep it all rolling along. So I look for good …
Read More “A spot of good news, a spot of bad, a spot of gibberish, a spot.”
By Tony Attwood It is of course commonplace to claim that Arsenal have the most expensive tickets in England, Europe and the world, the solar system, the galaxy, the Local Cluster, the universe and the multiverse, although none of these claims is true when like is matched with like. Pricing is a complex issue, and …
By Tony Attwood Power in football – now that is an interesting topic and I am obliged to the Daily Telegraph by thinking about writing an article on it. It is a bit of a tough read because there is so much puffing up of themselves and all their collective work in coming up with …
Read More “What organisations and what people really have the power in football?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Now normally I take the honest working man’s regular holiday – September to December, February to May – but quite ludicrously Untold has demanded that I work in October and write a column all about transfer type things. Well! I mean, “Well!” And to my utter surprise the transfer rumours have …
Read More “There is no open window, but there are ten transfer rumours for Arsenal next January”
By Tony Attwood If you feel that the commentary columns of Untold have been rather quiet of late it has been largely because of the fact that (for reasons that are not yet clear) we have dropped off the pages of NewsNow. I have written to the publishers several times telling them about it …
Read More “Revealed: the psychological condition behind the anti-arsenal-arsenal”
By Tony Attwood I have oft made the point that newspapers follow each other. One club is a great historic family unit that everyone loves, and nothing that happens there can change this. Another is a stumbling, rumbling disaster of incompetence, and it only takes one hiccup for the old stories to be rolled out. …
STYLE AND STEEL By Don McMahon While reviewing and watching the fallout from the Burnley game from the pundits, players and media, this comment came up multiple times in describing AFC’s gritty win against a park the flotilla team. Adrian Clarke and Skodran Mustafi aptly described it as an ugly performance meriting all 3 points …
Read More “Style and Steel: the rise of the polyvalent player”
By Andrew Crawshaw and Tony Attwood The story is that Arsenal can’t do transfers. The manager won’t spend money, the club dithers, there is an overarching level of gross incompetence. We’ve heard it often, and of course it is difficult to prove or disprove without having closer access to the club than any of us …
A very personal odyssey, by Tony Attwood It started with three of us from AISA having a meeting at the Emirates with the club’s chief exec discussing how the area around the stadium could be made more Arsenal-like. Never having been a retiring sort of fellow I immediately pitched in telling Mr Gazidis in no uncertain terms …
Read More “The Untold Banner on TV, continuing the tradition of the club and our blog”
By Max Kerr One of the saddest stories for me to have emerged from football, is that of Justin Fashanu (1961-1998). A talented striker, who played for England, scored the goal of the season while playing for Norwich in 1980, and was the first black footballer to command a million pound transfer fee (to Brian …
Read More “Professional football: one of the last bastions of homophobia.”
By Tony Attwood Watching the game on Sky and listening to the studio conversation after the match there seemed to be a general consensus that a) the Ox did not touch the ball, it was Kos who kicked it forward, and b) although the ball his Kos’ hands it was not handball. Of course if …
Read More “A goal or not a goal? Burnley v Arsenal – the first reactions.”
Continuing from this morning’s preview… Meanwhile the Burnley manager has been making the usual positive noises about how wonderful Mr Wenger is but he has added to that, “As managers we all understand the fan mentality, the thirst and desire to win and be successful, but from a manager’s point of view you have to scratch …
Read More “Burnley v Arsenal, the team, two contrasting styles of play and the sequences”
By Bulldog Drummond “Seven and a half?” I hear you shout… well all the papers are doing their “five things” this and “ten things” that, so Untold, being Untold likes to go somewhere else. Seven and a half seems about right. 1: Style and efficiency Leading up to today’s games Mr Wenger said, “In recent …
