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
This is the strangest summer break I’ve known. It’s not the transfer or non-transfer stuff – it is this business of who owns the clubs. This issue has been lurking around for weeks at Southampton, Portsmouth, Newcastle and little Notts County. But what brings it into focus today is that the Financial Action Task Force …
Read More “Money laundering, Notts County, Portsmouth, Newcastle, etc”
So it looks like Liverpool are being further financed by Royal Bank of Scotland (who own Nat West) despite protests from Liverpool’s own supporters. And Mr Usmanov has (according to the Guardian and the Times today) suggested that there should be a £100m rights issue at the Arsenal. The Times says, “Red & White believes …
Read More “Who do you trust the most: the Times or Mr Usmanov?”
Henry James Redknapp is round about the same age as me, although I think I am better looking. He is a darling of the media and almost always gets a good press. But what is his career and his brush with the law? Given that he now resides at the other end of Seven Sisters, …
Read More “The Redknapp Legacy: how disaster follows Harry every step of the way”
Articles on Untold Arsenal are so good that they also appear on Team Talk. The same is true with much of our correspondence. The name of the “author” is changed on Team Talk. Team Talk have been told repeatedly, but won’t stop the activity, so, I think we should celebrate this situation. Read it here, …
Read More “There are 3 ways of running a top EPL club. (Two don’t always work)”
Doomsday postponed, but Paradise Lost, maybe. We now know it is to be EPSN that shows the Setanta programmes – probably charging us a fee per game. So the EPL have got their money – at least for this season. Although the small print suggests that there is a question about how much the 3 …
We’ll remember this day for three reasons. First and most pointlessly, because today I was proven right on the transfer market for the third time in a row. I called Nasri, Arshavin and now Vermaelen correctly, all weeks before the actual transfer. Clever me. I feel rather chuffed. Much more to the point is the …
Read More “We will remember 19 June 09 for many years to come”
By Greg Adams At a time when most of the major Premier League clubs have been bought by Russian, American and Arab investors and mortgaged to within an inch of their survival we should be grateful that, for the time being, ownership of Arsenal remains largely in the hands of those that love the club …
Read More “Why you should join Arsenal Supporters Trust today”
By Ronny Lamb and Tony Attwood Aided by the growing number of correspondents around Europe who are now contributing to Untold Arsenal I’ve been pulling together the financial doings of Real Madrid. And here’s the irony. They are just like Manchester IOU. Each is as bust as the other – and there are serious doubts …
Read More “United in insolvency: the story of Real Madrid & Manchester U”
There is muttering in Spain. Real Mad are known to have government support – the deal they did over the training ground, the way they can borrow when others can’t – I won’t go into that in detail – you can read it all elsewhere. So Barca et al are unhappy, but, at least for …
Read More “What does Ronaldo’s move mean for Arsenal and the EPL?”
I spent a jolly afternoon on Wednesday in London, doing my bit being interviewed for a DVD review of last season, pontificating in front of the cameras on the Lord Wenger and all his doings etc. Of course the great danger is that one can, in the heat of questioning, make a prediction or two, …
UPDATE – since I wrote this article it seems Setanta is going bust. I have added an update commentary based on that view, in the correspondence column that follows the article. Here’s the original article….. Shock horror, English football is falling apart – and Arsenal are making a signing of someone who is not 11 …
Although this article doesn’t start with anything Arsenal it gets there in the end. If you have a mind to, stay with me. Writing (as I am) as many Europeans exercise their right to vote for Members of the European Parliament I am reminded of John Philpot Curran and a speech he made on the …
Read More “All Arsenal supporters should write to RBS about Liverpool’s loans”
Suddenly the rest of the footballing world catches up on what we’ve been talking about for two seasons. Big clubs are getting into big financial trouble. I speak of none other than Liverpool Insolvency – named thus in this blog about a year back because we started to talk about a day when, amazingly, Liverpool …
Read More “Liverpool and Arsenal: two different ways to run a football club.”
Understanding how the transfer window works (A large dose of realism required) by Terence McGovern The transfer window is upon us once more. This annual merry-go-round of sloppy journalism and internet speculation is eclipsed only by the immoral level of spending money not owned on things not needed that would make Paris Hilton Blanche. It …
This site was set up with the explicit purpose of supporting Arsene Wenger. I started calling him The Lord Wenger, to emphasise the fact, and for getting on for two years there have been almost daily commentaries which support him. But in the last few months a number of anti-Wenger commentators have joined in the …
The answer is certainly not Arsenal – because of the way our club is run. But some others are not so well-organised. They might teeter on the brink for years but in the end… I posted a brief summary of this the other day, but got so many emails about it privately that I thought …
Just imagine what would have happened if Ancelotti – late of AC Milan now of the KGB in Fulham had been at Arsenal. At first the club’s world-wide supporters would have rejected his credentials. Here is a man whose greatest achievement in Europe prior to joining AC Milan was to win not the Euro Cup …
Read More “If Ancelotti had been at Arsenal we’d have kicked him out”
After those of us with a bit too much time on our hands gave the Mirror and News of the World a bit of a run around over their “Everyone wants to leave Arsenal” campaign, they’ve retaliated twice – once with the old-fashioned “snub” standby, and now today with with Wenger clearout story. The “snub” …
Read More “Invented Arsenal stories + a rundown of all the clubs that have gone bust”
It is tempting to say it has been a bad week for the BBC – looking stupid over totally ignoring the FA Youth Cup Final and now having their lead football reporter threaten violence against a fellow journalist while broadcasting. But I fear the powers in the BBC don’t even recognise any of this as …
Read More ““I will kick him; I will kick him” – Alan Green last night”
The first rule of journalism is fill you spacce with the official line – cos if you don’t someone else will take your space, and you might be asked again. The second rule of journalism is never apologise, never explain. So it is that as it has become utterly clear that only a handful of …
Read More “This Sunday we’ll tell Arsene Wenger what we think of him”
To celebrate Anorak Friday, Untold Arsenal met ex-Arsenal and ex-Blackburn superstar Aaron Fortesque Bentley, who is now knocking them in and laying them low for Hottentot Reservoirs in their crowd filled arena at Leyton Ointment. Untold Arsenal asked Mr Bentley if he was enjoying his current stint as a working foot-baller. U-A: Are you enjoying …
Most EPL clubs buy players with borrowed money or the owner’s petrodollars. Arsenal are different – the money available for buying comes from profit generated by success and sales. Put another way, the basic income from TV, marketing and games goes to pay the mortgage and the salaries. The purchases come from other sources. At …
I used to think Keith Harris had a puppet called Orville, but actually he is the man acted as the go-between between clubs such as West Iceland United, Manchester Arab and KGB Fulham and their current owners – setting up the deals to transfer ownership. (Keith Harris’ web site says, KEITH HARRIS is one of …
Read More “Football on the edge of collapse (except Arsenal)”
Is fourth good enough? Well it depends on what you mean by fourth. There was a time a couple of years back when Liverpool came fourth and I remember looking at the table with interest at the time and realising that they were so far behind the top that they were closer (in number of …
There are clubs that owe an uncontrolled unmaintainable fortune, and those that don’t. Arsenal have a debt that declines year by year with the mortgage, the rest have debts so huge they can’t be refinanced and interest can’t be repaid. And there are Arsenal supporters who think Arsenal should join these manic clubs, should buy …
