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 You will recall that we have tried a few times so far this world cup to predict the score of a specific game. There’s been some success but I think I would be exaggerating a little if I claimed that we were always getting it right. Nevertheless here’s another go… and I’ll …
Read More “England v Columbia: how to work out what the score is likely to be”
by Tony Attwood Two news items appearing today of wider interest: the advent of a winter break in the Premier League, and the fact that after the longest running case in the history of the Court of Arbitration in Sport, Manchester City have been allowed to sign their 16 year old. (Or at least he …
Read More “Premier League heads for Winter Break and Man C win appeal in kangaroo court”
by Tony Attwood It has taken a long time to get there, but Uefa has let it be known that Paris Saint-Germain is still under investigation for breaches of the financial fair play rules that some of us had assumed had been buried in a box marked “don’t open under any circumstances or the rich …
Read More “Maybe FFP isn’t dead after all: and maybe the Court of Arbitration is finally stirring”
By Tony Attwood Watching the newspapers and UK media outlets discuss VAR while I am in Australia has been illuminating to say the least. Two days go the BBC announced that the Premier League clubs were not expected to announce that VAR is being introduced next season. The next day the Daily Express announced that …
By Tony Attwood It was rather sad in a way to hear Alan Greene on Radio 5 doing the Liverpool Tottenham match and being utterly restrained in what he said about the refereeing in the game. Even if he thought all the decisions near the end of the match were completely right, in the good …
Read More “Premier League is now only second to Germany in lack of competitiveness”
By Tony Attwood According to the Guardian “Chelsea have been accused, after an initial Fifa investigation, of breaking the rules on the signing of 25 foreign players under the age of 18. The number of cases could rise, with the matter now in the hands of the governing body’s disciplinary committee, which has the power to …
Read More “Child trafficking allegations return to haunt Chelsea”
By Sir Hardly Anyone And what a fabulous night at the Sweet FA it was. As the representative of Oakham and Rutland Football Association, one of the oldest FAs in the country I was delighted to join in the big bash at Wembley Stadium. The speeches, although largely incoherent were spectacular. And the entertainment supplied …
Read More “A report from the FA’s Christmas Eve party at Wembley Stadium”
by Tony Attwood Bayern Munich have won the German league five times in a row. In fact they have won it 27 times, which is a record. And they are currently eight points above their nearest rival at the top of the league, so that might well be six times in a row, come next …
Read More “As the Premier League embraces the Euro model, competition is more or less deceased”
By Tony Attwood . There’s been a bit of annoyance spreading in the world of football of late. First off we had “the inability to confirm the time and date of the Tottenham Hotspur v West Ham United Premier League fixture in late December is both unacceptable to fans and symptomatic of a deeper problem …
Read More “Contempt: the prime way in which broadcasters and clubs and the FA treat football fans”
Two unrelated stories by Josif When AC Milan signed Leonardo Bonucci from their rivals Juventus last summer, it was seen as the final statement of intent from the new owners of the Italian and European giants. Bonucci, one of the best central defenders in the world and a member of famous BBC-trio in the …
Read More “Things don’t always work out as expected… From AC Milan to Everton”
by Tony Attwood Imagine your ran a business. You were trading with a company and suddenly you find a whole stream of its senior people being hauled into court and charged with corruption in general and taking millions of pounds worth of bribes in particular. One after another they are charged and they eventually plead …
by Andrew Crawshaw There have been 11 rounds of matches in the Premier League so far and the referees have been announced for matchweek 12- nearly a third of the way through the season giving a total of 110 games played. The PGMO have used 18 referees so far so each one should have officiated …
Read More “So what does the PGMO lack of Referees actually do for clubs?”
by Tony Attwood Whenever we cover the dodgy doings by football clubs on this site, we get emails saying “your club is just as bad” and “why don’t you just write about your club” and then a few things that are not really repeatable. So we’ll take those as read, and remind everyone that …
Read More “Leicester City; the sound of chickens coming back to roost”
By Tony Attwood Sport, as the EU recognises in its regulations, is different. There is competition within it – that is by and large the whole point – but that competition is different from that of firms competing in most open markets. The competitive route is structured in a particular way – primarily through having …
Read More “Monopoly suppliers need regulators or democracy. In football we have neither.”
By Tony Attwood The news that Sepp Blatter has been accused by Hope Solo, the USA women’s football team goalkeeper, of having sexually assaulted her at Fifa’s Ballon d’Or awards ceremony in January 2013 doesn’t really come as much of a surprise, simply because nothing comes as much of a surprise with Blatter. Or come to …
Read More “As long as we fail to ask “why?” in football, nothing will ever change”
By Tony Attwood As Germany looks to sort out the mess left behind from the chaos surrounding its refereeing system, they might choose also to have a look at the salary structure of referees in various leagues. And the first thing we have to note is that just as the PGMO have gone out on …
by Tony Attwood The big problem in Premier League refereeing is silence. The silence engineered by PGMO, and only just, after years of missed opportunities, occasionally broken by the normally obsequious national media in England. It is this silence that reveals why we are still struggling to show something is fundamentally wrong with refereeing in the …
By Tony Attwood Although it rarely makes the news in the British press these days in the United States and Switzerland the issue of the corruption of football on a global scale continues to make the headlines. And much of the time the story is the same: dozens of people and dozens of companies have …
by Tony Attwood In the Leipzig match against Bayern in the Cup, the referee was Felix Zwayer. The sporting director of RB Leipzig is Ralf Rangnick. Coming up to half time Mats Hummels and Ralf Rangnick come together on the pitch. The ref givs a penalty and then apparently on consulting with the linesmen in the far distance, …
By Tony Attwood Why this story? The argument on Untold, based on our published research, is that well over half of the football news that appears on the newspapers, their bloggettas, radio and TV, are fake. Add this to the deliberately misleading emphasis that the media give even when reporting facts (the Guardian’s notorious “Arsenal …
Read More “How fake news came to dominate the reporting of football in all English media”
By Tony Attwood If you have been reading Untold for a long old time you’ll know that the issues of football finances is one that we like to dig into off and on – and not just regarding Arsenal. And there’s a good reason for that, because when we started, nearly 10 years ago, …
By Tony Attwood If you have taken a glance at the broader news of football of late you will know that there is an ever deepening scandal surrounding the FA at the moment, a scandal that has swamped Greg Clarke, the chairman, and Martin Glenn, the chief executive. It has shown the FA completely unable …
Read More “Why the government can’t reform the FA, and why the FA will (sadly) survive forever”
By Tony Attwood Ever since the organising countries for the world cups in 2018 and 2022 were announced questions have been asked. Russia, because (to give just one tiny example) it undertook all of its application work and correspondence on computers that it hired, and then gave back to the company it borrowed them from. …
Read More “Fifa and Uefa: the corruption continues. Is it really just limited to the world game?”
by Tony Attwood In June 2010 I filled up an otherwise rather boring day researching what it was that made some international sides better than others. Was it the number of players who played in their own country’s league? The size of the country? Or something else? It turned out to be something else: the …
Read More “How the home grown rule has completely failed to make any difference at all.”
By Tony Attwood At the start it is always the same. First there are the deals and the regulations: in the case of football the requirements that the Premier League and others place on broadcasters, such as not showing any pitch invasion, not showing violence in the ground, limiting the questioning individual refs and never …
Read More “Football analysis: hear it, read it, see it enough, and it starts to become true.”
