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
Today’s story from the Arsenal anniversary files is of Mark Randall, and man who in his early days appeared to be destined for great things (and Mr Wenger appeared to agree with that) but who could never settle at Arsenal, and indeed appears to have had difficulty settling anywhere else. And yet in his role …
By Tony Attwood There are two ways to imagine football as and when the current crisis is all over. One is that everything picks up from where it left off, with the same competitions, the same number of games, the same financial situation, the same funding etc. The other is that this crisis will cause a …
A Short History of Arsenal Football Club Just about any football fan would prefer to spend their days listening, watching, or reading about their favourite club. However, real-life sometimes gets in the way and that isn’t always possible. Matches, and sometimes entire leagues, are cancelled or you might not be able to find the time …
By Tony Attwood In the last set of figures presented via annual accounts, the 20 clubs in the Premier League were shown to have a turnover of £4.827 bn. Which is quite a lot of money. Their wages bill was just over half that. 58% to be (more or less) exact. Now obviously the virus …
Read More “Premier League: No one seems to have planned for anything to go wrong.”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal locked down, Arsenal fans locked out, government and horse racing says “carry on, carry on!” See also… What do the terms and conditions of my season ticket say about coronavirus? Everywhere shuts down, except England. No one knows what to do except President Trump who knows everything because he’s clever. Or …
Read More “Arsenal in lockdown, football not in lockdown – horse racing says “tally ho!””
Arsenal is a team with a rich history of winning trophies in some of the best most prestigious competitions in the UK. Over the course of their 100 years in the top division of English football, the Gunners have won thirteen EFL and Premier League titles, two League Cups, fifteen FA Community Shields, and …
By Tony Attwood If you create a magazine which boasts that it is the “New Home of Football Writing” then all it needs to be is a little bit better than the football journalism that exists elsewhere. Which you might well think is not that difficult, given the lunatic inaccuracies that we see and hear …
Read More “Is a new Arsenal club being born? Actually, probably not.”
By Tony Attwood And so the noisy fans with their little banners and rather small protest marches have had their way. Two managers out and millions upon millions upon millions spent on players – just as they demanded. And for what? Well, in order to get us seven points above relegation Team P W D …
Read More “This is the worst Arsenal season in 25 years. But can we do what we did back then?”
by Tony Attwood Latest news: We are developing our own video channel. It’s still at the experimental stage but you can get a feel here… Untold Gooner News We recently published research that showed that only 20% of clubs in the PL that have changed managers in the past 18 months are now better …
Read More “Do we want Arsenal to wait 30 years to recover. Or is there a shortcut?”
By Tony Attwood The book “What you think you know about football is wrong” is itself so wrong and so flawed it ought to be withdrawn and an apology issued to everyone who has bought at copy. If you have read any of the work we have published across the last ten years …
Read More “New book “exposing” Arsenal’s cheating is itself pure fantasy and lies”
By Tony Attwood I have the view that having started this blog a few years ago, and now having a fair old number of readers each day, I have a duty to try and keep the thing running, while living up to the original notions behind the blog: that it should be pro-Arsenal at all …
Note: Because of the origins of the Arsenal Statues and because of their obvious historical context, the launch of the statues has already been covered in depth on our companion site the Arsenal History blog. But, I know that many readers of Untold don’t always pop along to the History site… and this was such …
Read More “Why the statues at the Ems mean so much to Untold and to every Arsenal supporter”
By Tony Attwood In early August 2010, I was privileged to get a meeting with Ivan Gazidis the chief executive of Arsenal FC. I was there as part of a delegation of fans putting forward ideas about Arsenal and the wider world. And because (as you may know) I am interested in Arsenal’s history, I …
Read More “Arsenal’s three statues at the Ems: exclusive revelation of who is on show”
By Tony Attwood I recently wrote about an idea for a series of articles through the season on ex-Arsenal players who are now in senior management anywhere in the world. A lot of names were submitted – although many of these are not managing now, and I was looking for current people. The list is …
Read More “Ex-Arsenal players: so few in management so many in journalism”
By Walter Broeckx The “you won nothing for X years” mantra sung by the media and repeated by a part of the fanbase is something that one never hears of other teams. More sensible readers on Untold know that periods when you win nothing are part of the game. In fact they are part of …
By Walter Broeckx You know the Arsenal hasn’t won anything in X years mantra that the media and some desperate fans use every day to paint us as rubbish. And thanks to a remark of a reader on Untold I wondered: if you take a look at the history of a club how long does …
Read More “How long can we go without winning the league before it gets worrying?”
Arsenal on Twitter @UntoldArsenal Untold Arsenal on Facebook here By Mike Collins in Canada Well, As an avid reader of your terrific blog I just thought I would put down a few musings from my getting on for 60 years of giving hard earned money to AFC; I might just as well have written a …
Arsenal on Twitter @UntoldArsenal Untold Arsenal on Facebook here By Tony Attwood Newspapermen like dreaming up statistics. Not necessarily important statistics, but just statistics. Many of them don’t get picked up by others and so quietly die a death, but others get repeated and repeated – and so some people start to think that the …
Read More “How many years since various clubs won the league”
Arsenal on Twitter @UntoldArsenal Untold Arsenal on Facebook here Are Arsenal Players Still Lightweight? (Comparing the Arsenal of 2004 and the present batch) By Nitesh Padhi A common complaint against this present Arsenal team is that they are too lightweight. Of course, we can never ever forget the Invincibles and the Tony Adams era, men …
Arsenal on Twitter @UntoldArsenal Untold Arsenal on Facebook here by Tony Attwood Who made Arsenal the club of world-wide renown and stature that we now have the privilege to watch? Who was the visionary who transformed us from being an ordinary club into being one of the great clubs? Of course many answers are possible, …
Read More “Who was the greatest Arsenal visionary? You might be surprised to find out.”
By Tony Attwood Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s my dad took me to see Cardiff City vs Arsenal. He had an old friend there – maybe even a pal from the war, I am not sure, and we went and the old friend’s house, before walking on to the match. I don’t …
Arsenal on Twitter @UntoldArsenal Untold Arsenal on Facebook here By Tony Attwood Don’t Panic. This is not yet another ad for my book, in fact apart from this sentence, my book doesn’t get a mention. This is about the books published by GCR. Until now GCR has had a special place in my heart because …
Read More “Other stuff to buy this Christmas for an Arsenal fan and family”
By Tony Attwood Of course in the coming days there will be the usual half dozen or so articles on everything to do with Arsenal vs the Kingdom of Kev. Already I am sitting on a bizarre and eccentric review of the Kingdom by Billy the Dog, not to mention Dogface’s remarkable review of the …
Read More “In a few years time our north eastern trip could be to see Bedlington Terriers”
The Untold Invincibles: Genesis & End of FC Start During the half-time interval, an SS officer entered FC Start’s dressing room. In a stern tone, he darkly said: “You really cannot expect to win, however. Just consider for a moment what will happen if you do.” The FC Start players knew what this meant. Lose …
Read More “The Untold Invincibles: Genesis & End of FC Start”
Wenger, Chapman, Graham – a comparison By Tony Attwood I was intending to stop this series on Wenger after covering the three basics: Philosophy, Practice and the Total Revolution. But a reader wrote in asking me what would constitute failure in terms of the Wenger revolution, and I thought it such a good question I …
