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 Of course Untold doesn’t have the resources to do its own original research into many of the stories that circulate in football but we do have friends in Europe who forward articles that appear in European papers. Articles which are studiously ignored in the British press. And it was from these that …
Read More “Gotcha: Infantino revealed as being as bent as those he replaced at Fifa”
By Tony Attwood . The Observer has an article today headed “The transfer hunters: how Premier League scouting set-ups compare”. A range of writers from the Observer and Guardian have each taken one or two clubs and given a quick run down of how things are going in terms of bringing in new talent. The …
By Tony Attwood Yesterday’s article How Arsenal fans are being duped over the purchase of a striker made the point that there is not always a direct relationship between having the top scorer and winning the league. A number of correspondents queried this, although I was not able to publish all of them since some came …
Read More “How many times has top scorer in the Prem League actually won the league title?”
By Tony Attwood I am always interested in the way in which a manipulated statement of fact can be used to try and show up Arsenal in a bad light. Interested because normally the examination of the details tends to show the writer, rather than Arsenal, up in a bad light. You may recall my …
Read More “How Arsenal fans are being duped over the purchase of a striker.”
By Tony Attwood I wrote a little while ago answering the point that what Arsenal needed was better attackers, pointing out that in fact we had only scored nine fewer goals than Chelsea through the course of the season, and so on its own this hardly seemed the complete reason why we came fifth and …
Read More “Revealed: the secret that will allow Arsenal to win the league next season.”
By Tony Attwood In February 2002, my colleague Anne, made reference to one Julio Grondana in an article in Untold in which note Julio Grondona as the head of the Argentine FA since 1979 and who is FIFA’s senior vice-president and head of its finance committee. As Anne said, “here is the man who has …
By Tony Attwood As you may know, if you are a regular reader of Untold, there are certain themes within football that we particularly like to cover: the quality and bias of refereeing, the way the media both define what is important and what is not and then comment upon it as if they were …
By Tony Attwood As others have pointed out, the forthcoming season’s league fixture list has not been kind to us. First off there is the issue of what happens after the Europa League matches on Thursdays, with us playing on a Sunday. After the first Europa match we have Chelsea away After the second we …
Read More “Why Arsenal really need a full-blown second XI in the coming season”
By Tony Attwood “Kylian Mbappe sends out clear sign he’s Arsenal-bound with brand new Aaron Ramsey-inspired hair” Yes apparently he has died his hair blonde and it looks like Ramsey, even though the two players come from an utterly different heritage. And that is a genuine quote from a bloggetta. Compared to that, “Arsenal are …
Read More “Why Mbappe is in, and why it don’t matter if Alexis is out”
By Tony Attwood The notion that other clubs move at speed in the transfer window and Arsenal lag behind, unable to complete deals, arguing about contracts, not flying out to see the player when that would swing it, allowing other clubs to hijack transfers – all of this is at the very heart of the …
Read More “Are Arsenal really much slower than other clubs in getting the signings they want?”
By Sir ‘ard Lee Anyone It is looking embarrassingly as if the journalists and bloggetta scribbers have shot their bolts, using up every viable rumour all in one burst and now leaving themselves with nothing to scribble about in terms of who is going where and when. However help is at hand because starting tomorrow …
By Tony Attwood Welcome once more to the mighty Arsenal Transfer Index – the 11th edition of the 2017 version. The number of players Arsenal are buying is how up to a giddy 57 – and we still are 16 days away from the window creaking open. As for the leavers 16 players out …
by Tony Attwood OK are you ready for a real conspiracy theory? Try this one. One of Untold’s valued overseas correspondents sent over a report this morning concerning the fact that for a United Arab Emirates game against Thailand the UAE demanded of Fifa that they change the referee, because the referee came from Qatar. …
By Sir Hardly An’yoné I have discovered that some silly people have taken to laughing at my name, and so I have decided to change it by adding an apostrophe and an accent. Please take note. It is now pronounced An Yo Ney. Now the news. 1: Arsène Wenger is pushing forward with an overhaul …
By Tony Attwood One of the amusing things about the bloggettas is that they are still running little articles about Arsenal having a desperate shortage of defenders (according to one piece today) or midfielders or centre forwards or whatever takes their fancy. Indeed the notion that everything can be reduced to simplicities has caught on …
Read More “Supposing we cull 10 players to meet the “25” limit, what sort of squad do we have?”
By Tony Attwood, based on “L’avenir s’annonce radieux” in the Swiss newspaper, Le Matin. As you may know, the UK media has a general agreement not to comment on Fifa corruption matters, at least until they explode, for two reasons. First because doing so might damage the image of the FA and the national teams, …
By Sir Hardly Anyone, and a friend. Read all about it, I say, Step Right Up, All you need to know, and other meaningless cries from the streets. Incoming 1: Yacine Brahimi Arsenal are preparing to sign Yacine Brahimi but don’t like the cost, according to Correio da Manha, but the paper say that Arsenal …
Read More “Mahrez delayed explained, problem with Greek player’s name, and Fabregas return.”
By Tony Attwood While most clubs have problems finding eight home grown players to fit into the list that makes up the 25 permitted players aged over 21, Arsenal’s problem this summer is in whittling down the number of over 21s to 25. My earlier post suggested only a modest bit of pruning has to …
Read More “Arsenal set to cull ten over 21 players from the first team rosta..”
By Tony Attwood If you have been reading Untold for more than a couple of days you’ll probably have got the idea that one of the things that fascinates and outrages me in equal measure is the way the media behaves towards Arsenal – and by extension from that – why they do it. The …
Read More “What happened in last four seasons and how football bloggers could learn from politics”
By Tony Attwood Ainsley Maitland-Niles joined Arsenal aged six and has come up through the Hale End Academy. He moved into the under 21s in 2013–14 season, just one year after playing in the under 18s for the first time, and signed a professional contract with Arsenal on 24 October 2014. He made his first …
By Tony Attwood Arsenal have 25 players already logged for their formal list of players for the new season, with one player from the list released (Sanogo) and one already signed. Which means that for each new player brought in, someone is going to have to go. But when it comes to the “25” there …
by Tony Attwood There is no doubt that the Conservative Party in the UK has taken us into a new world of homophobia, denial, anti-women’s rights and links to past terrorism in its coalition plans with the Democratic Unionist Party. This has left the transfer rumour inventors in a quandary, wondering how on earth they …
Read More “Transfer rumour reporters refuse to be outdone by Conservative Party”
By Bulldog Drummond It’s the weekend, a time when through the season I knock up a few bits and pieces about the forthcoming match – but for a few weeks we ain’t got a match so I can’t. But there is nothing in the rule books that says we can’t have a little snigger …
By Sir Hardly Anyone Naturally as a member of the aristocracy I don’t normally work in the afternoons, but having been up all night helping our great and glorious Prime Minister win another landslide by keeping spirits up in the pub, I thought I’d better do a quick roundup before I go to the victory …
By Tony Attwood Liverpool betrayed small-club mentality in allowing Arsenal to sign Alexis Sanchez That headline came from the Daily Telegraph on 18 December 2014, and it was interesting at the time as it reflected a shift in position by the media. Before then, although Liverpool had not been immune to press criticism, they …
Read More “Liverpool and the notion of small-club mentality”
