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 So, Vardy is another Higuain, the sort of transfer that everyone is so sure is on, that he actually signed a week ago, that it was kept secret, that he had a medical last weekend, but didn’t, that he was going to tell the club his decision on monday but didn’t. Either …
Read More “What we learned: Leicester can’t do sums, Vardy is getting a bit too big for his boots”
By Tony Attwood If you run a business and spend quite a bit of time dealing with other businesses, there is every chance that at some time or another you will have found yourself in an argument with an individual or a company that behaves utterly and totally unreasonably. They make a claim that is …
Read More “José Mourinho walks free from court as Chelsea apologise “unreservedly””
By Tony Attwood Of course you need a good goalscorer if you want to win the league. But do you need the best one there is? Having looked at whether changing the manager works, buying in big name players works, and whether injury levels affect the position in the table, I thought I’d see how …
Read More “Does having top league scorer help you win the league? Here’s the stats…”
By Tony Attwood In a widely reported recent interview, Arsenal’s CEO Ivan Gazidis said of Arsène Wengrer, “He has always put the long-term health of the club first. He wants to hand over a football club, whenever that it is, that is in great shape. He views that as a massively important part of his …
AUTHORITARANISM……………Don McMahon Society needs authority, since without it, we have anarchy or worse still, madness and chaos that destroy all before it. That said, some forms of authoritarianism are worse than others. For example, the theocracy currently in vigour in Iran has limited the power of the average citizen significantly and is posited on the …
Read More “We are right, you are wrong; we know best, we cannot be challenged”
By Sir Hardly Anyone (in jovial mood and jaunty hat) A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go We’ll catch a fox and put him in a box And then we’ll let him go Isn’t it curious how quickly the mood can change! Now we live in a one issue world we can flip from …
Read More “Are Arsenal hunting Foxes? After Vardy there is another lined up. Tally ho!”
By Tony Attwood Among psychologists it is called Mathswash: the notion of presenting ideas and vague thoughts on what might happen, as if they were firm facts and evidence based predictions. No caveat, no suggestion this might be wrong – just here it is, it’s bleedin’ obvious. You know the style: If Mr Wenger continues …
by Dr Billy “the Dog” McGraw Chief psychologist at the Institute of Certain Things, The University Hospital of the North Circular Road. I would like you to know that normally I don’t do sundays, but there have been so many calls on my time from members of the aaa utterly distraught that their banners and …
Read More “Arsenal 3 Scotland 0 and the big problem with signing Vardy that seems to be overlooked”
By Tony Attwood Copa America Centenario is what is happening in the US just at the moment, celebrating 100 years of CONMEBOL, the South American Football Federation, and of Copa América. It is being held outside South America for the first time – in the USA in fact, (in case you haven’t been following events) in agreement …
Read More “Ooooooooooooooooospina: its Copa America Centenario, and he’s done great”
By Tony Attwood [this story was updated on 9am, UK time, following publication an hour earlier] As you might have gathered, transfer rumours on this site are pretty much the province of Sir Hardly Anyone who just a couple of days back ran the story Unbelievable Transfer Shock; Arsenal sign £20m striker in secret. Here’s …
By Tony Attwood According to Die Welt, Fifa is investigating claims that the new President of Fifa, a Mr Infantino, has been doing the rounds destroying recordings of a Fifa council meeting in Mexico. A Fifa spokesman pronounced to Sky Sports News: “We are not in a position to indicate if we have or have …
By Tony Attwood Top of the list today among the oddities of England’s press when it deals haphazardly and on the cheap with football, is the Independent’s home football page which has within it a listing of the top three stories for each club. Or at least that is what it is supposed to have. …
Read More “Memo to the Metro Newspaper. Just how miserable would you like me to be?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone In the last month Arsenal have been tipped to sign an unbelievable 57 players. 57 in one month, and it is more than likely that in the hurly burly I have missed a few. Apologies to those players, their agents and the tipsters in the press for all omissions. According the …
by Tony Attwood Have we proven that there is something wrong with refereeing in this country? It is a question that comes up each time further revelations are made about refereeing by Untold, and I had decided a little while ago not to go over the same old issues of “proof” again. But two events made …
Read More “Maybe it is wholly appropriate that the PL has a ref system different from all the rest”
By Tony Attwood There is a preliminary question to answer here which is, “which fair play league?” because I have come up with three of them. I know its a bit nerdy to go through all of them, but since no one else has, and since we have been publishing the fair play league tables …
Read More “Arsenal won the Fair Play League this season. I wonder why the media didn’t mention it.”
By Tony Attwood Earlier this year there was talk that the FA was going to reform itself. I must say that I didn’t really hold my breath in expectation, we’ve heard it 100 times before and the FA never reforms itself. We’ve covered the stories about how it has wasted huge sums of money …
Read More “The reform of the FA is now down to a man particularly familiar with lap dancing.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Yes this past week’s transfer tales have been full of both in’s and out’s and with only three months to go before the transfer windows slams shut on your fingers and little driblets of blood spatter onto the carpet you just had cleaned, the clubs are starting to panic. However there …
Read More “Unbelievable Transfer Shock; Arsenal sign £20m striker in secret.”
ASSOCIATION FOOTBALL IN CANADA……………. by Don McMahon This is not meant as an exhaustive or serious overview of what is happening in my country’s Association Football (known as soccer over here) but rather an overview of how we treat, support, officiate and play the game in the Great White North. It is called the …
ARSENAL 13. Internet has got us all hooked. Having no access to the internet is unthinkable now. Forget phones, we have internet on our watch now, whoever wears those.!!. Our routines have changed and is now all wired up. I start my day with a peep into the phone. And then when I …
By Tim Charlesworth My last article talked about the two big gambles that Wenger took in constructing the squad in the summer of 2015. The first gamble was in midfield and the second was in the striker/no 9 position. So now we take a look at last season’s strikers. We went into the season with …
Read More “Strikers: the second Arsenal gamble of Summer 2015 (and will we buy this summer?)”
By Tony Attwood This is the third article in the series about the way in which PGMO is organised. The first two articles published earlier today are… Referee Match Distribution: Is the Premier League the same as other top European leagues? Premier League Refereeing is based on a corrupt Italian model. Continuing from the …
Read More “Using a refereeing system based on Calciopoli – implications and press reaction.”
by Tony Attwood As the statistical analysis in our piece, Referee Match Distribution: Is the Premier League the same as other top European leagues? shows, Premier League refereeing far from being based on the methods used in other major leagues. Instead it is based on the model of the corrupt Italian league – the Calciopoli era …
Read More “Premier League Refereeing is based on a corrupt Italian model.”
Preliminaries Untold has argued for a number of years that the way refereeing is organised within the Premier League is different from that of other major leagues in Europe, but has similarities to the way in which Italian football was organised in the Calciopoli era in Italy in 2005/6. Our argument is that this …
By Tony Attwood As you have probably heard Tottenham have reached an agreement with the FA to play their Champions League home games at Wembley next season, exactly as Arsenal did in 1998 and 1999. Having won the double in 1998, Arsenal were hopeful of doing well in the Champions League, but there was a …
Read More “Tottenham to get added advantage in FA Cup in 2017/18”
By Tony Attwood The World Anti-Doping Agency is normally considered (at least in my house) to be one of the good parts of sport, particularly in taking on the old-chums act that is the IAAF, the world athletics body. Wada are the guys who have taken on Putin and Russia for its wholesale misuse of …
