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 Jérôme Valcke is the former Secretary General of FIFA who was fired on 13 January 2016 as a result of allegations arising from the ongoing 2015 Fifa corruption case. Now I know it is difficult to keep up with all the various Fifa corruption cases, because there are so many but in …
Read More “Federal court rejects challenges filed by Fifa secretary Jérôme Valcke.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Some days, being a glutton for punishment, I stare at myself in the mirror. And I ask why? Why do I bother to catalogue the doings of the inhabitants of the Toppled Bollard public house, home of the football journalist elite. I have below my ten stories of which the denizens …
Read More “Ten Arsenal transfer stories that may tell us more than we expected”
by Tony Attwood In a recent article I asked a question about “why does no one dare let the image of football slip?” The point was that football is not about the game of football and the support of the club anymore. It is about selling products to people. Football, in fact, is only about …
Read More “It is time for us to throw out the journalists so football can start making sense”
By Tony Attwood By now we are getting used to stories of clubs approaching financial collapse, although few of these stories make much overall sense. Arsenal making their coaching staff redundant as a financial measure means nothing in the overall structure of the club’s finances, but it is presented as a financial solution. Selling Maitland …
Read More “Football finances: the numbers are not making sense anywhere”
by Christophe Jost For years, each and every time the discussion has addressed the subject of a salary cap, that such system would be totally illegal under EU law and thus the discussions were pretty much dead on arrival or rather dead before the discussions have even arrived.. Indeed now that League One and League …
Read More “European clubs move towards the salary cap – and clear the legalities en route”
By Tony Attwood Following the announcement about the breaking up of their scouting team, the media has been unsurprisingly quiet on the issue of what Arsenal are going to do about recruitment of young players in the future. Unsurprisingly quiet, because working out what Arsenal’s plan is means undertaking a little bit of research and …
Read More “The real reason Arsenal is winding up its scouting network.”
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader you may have noticed our little campaign for footballers, supporters, club owners and workers to recognise that the stadia to be used in the 2022 world cup has been built by slave labour. Now since the whole origin of the Black Lives Matter campaign comes with …
Read More “Human rights abusers to be excluded from football? One tiny step forward”
By Sir Hardly Anyone With Arsenal having sacked their entire recruitment staff, the question arises, how are we going to find players any more? And the answer is that they don’t need to: the journalists and the bloggers will do it for nothing. When you think about it, it is obvious. The journalists spend all …
Read More “Why Arsenal don’t need their scouts any more: radical approach saves the club £££”
By Tony Attwood Football clubs, and to some degree football fans, tend to dislike change. I thought of this in writing a recent entry on the Anniversary Files on the Arsenal History Society website which celebrates the first penalty shoot out in England, which took place 50 years ago. That first penalty shoot out (which …
Read More “The Big Big Big change to football that is lurking just around the corner”
By Tony Attwood When Arsene Wenger left Arsenal the club had a magnificent chance to restructure everything. After all Mr Wenger had been at the club 22 years and because of his success record had the opportunity to create a club structure of his own design. Indeed it is said that once he sold Anelka …
Read More “Even Untold did not expect redundancies on this scale”
By Tony Attwood As you might know, I have a fascination with the way in which football, and its many aspects are presented on the media. How the integrity of referees is never questioned, how the notion that transfer rumours (which are 97% wrong) come to be considered news, how the key issues of the …
Read More “No turning back: why no one dares let the image of football slip”
By Tony Attwood One or two bits of the media in the UK have started to cover the incredible upheaval within Uefa, but where the UK media has taken an interest they seem to be playing down its importance, suggesting that it is all a bit of a storm in a very tiny teacup indeed. …
Read More “Are the media helping to cover up Fifa’s activities, on behalf of the FA?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The greatest fear of the football journalist is that he or she should be out on his/her own when it comes to a story. With no one doing any proper research they are anxious that their inventions should be backed up by other media. Which is partly why every possible transfer …
Read More “Media unites on six players who are leaving Arsenal”
By Sir Hardly Anyone There are some weird tales in the Daily Mail today. And they are so weird that even the word “weird” doesn’t seem to be enough. First, have this: “Sometimes, with Arsenal, it seems as if we have seen it all before. In this case, we pretty much have. In 2017, having …
Read More “How one journalist is responsible for making up Arsenal transfer tales”
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader of my ramblings you will know of my constant criticism of the English media that it ignores issues relating to Fifa. So when on 27 May 2015 seven Fifa officials were arrested at the Hotel Baur au Lac, Zürich, the English media were shocked. If they had read …
Read More “Compelling evidence that Fifa is corrupt and media has been negligent.”
By Tony Attwood “Never let a trophy get in the way of the constant knocking.” That could well be the Daily Mail’s basic rule of thumb as Martinez, Holding, Tierney, Bellerin, Xhaka and Lacazette were each given six out of ten for their performances in the cup final. “Just above average”. It seems a bit …
Read More “The Arsenal players were just above average, so who will we buy now?”
By Tony Attwood So we have been in 21 finals, one more than Manchester United, seven more than Chelsea and 12 more than Tottenham. We have won the FA Cup 14 times, two more than Manchester United, six more than Chelsea, six more than Tottenham In a season in which we had a manager who …
Read More “Every FA Cup record you might care to imagine now belongs to Arsenal*”
By Bulldog Drummond In my earlier piece I looked at a run from 1960 to 1970, in which Arsenal’s form was truly awful. We might now contrast this with the spell from December 1995 to March 2004. That was a spell of 26 games in which we lost just two. Date Game Res Score …
By Bulldog Drummond As we have often noted, the constant negatives run by the media against Arsenal, constitute a prolonged and deliberate attack on the club. The media does it because…. well, the rest of the media does it. Like smoking or taking heroin, it becomes a habit. Such has been the case with Arsenal, …
Read More “How the media is manipulating supporters’ thoughts before the Cup Final”
By Bulldog Drummond Only two teams left active so in many ways the injury table doesn’t matter any more. We have six and Chelsea four. However for once we are not top – Newcastle are on seven, presumably one of which is the illness of disappointment after the possibility of becoming the richest club in …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea injury news and surprising away form stats.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone. The Toppled Bollard is back open and the chickens are headlessly stumbling towards where the bar might have once been before it was locked down. And headlessly seems to be the right word as we read the headline from Tribalfootball that “Arsenal hero Nicholas urges Arteta to cull three players.” Mind …
Read More “Arsenal to slaughter 3 wild animals buy 11 players and keep one.”
By Bulldog Drummond And so we approach the cup final. Transfermarkt has an interesting table showing the number of players in the squad of each team and the total market value. Club Squad Foreigners Total market value Manchester City 34 27 £908.69m Liverpool FC 29 21 £903.29m Chelsea FC 33 23 £747.86m Manchester United 33 …
Read More “The value of the Arsenal players, and the Arsenal team”
By Tony Attwood It was particularly interesting to receive a fair number of comments yesterday following my review of the CAS findings on the Manchester City case. Not as many as we normally get, so many the subject of the Uefa and CAS reviews of their financial affairs is now considered done and dusted, although …
By Tony Attwood You may have noted a few of the sarcastic and critical comments posted on Untold following the Court of Arbitration in Sports findings in the Uefa v Manchester C appeal. I made the point a few times that the secretive nature of the CAS proceedings (something that does not happen in most …
Read More “CAS reasons for siding with Manchester City make interesting reading”
By Tony Attwood In 2019/20 an Arsenal player was given a yellow card for every 4.9 fouls the team committed. In fact Arsenal had to commit fewer fouls than any other club for each yellow card they got. The size of the difference between Arsenal and other clubs can be seen by the fact that …
Read More “The shocking statistics on how referees have affected Arsenal’s league position”
