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 Andrew Crawshaw As usual at the end of last season there was a significant turnover of players from the squad. Most Women’s contracts seem to run for two years and clubs rarely pay transfer fees so to see a number of players leave is nothing unusual. There were eight players who left at the …
by Tony Attwood Once upon a time football clubs were independent. Then Arsenal had the bright idea of taking over nearly bankrupt Margate, and turning them into a nursery club. No one had thought of that idea before. People talked of it ruining a part of the town’s heritage (even though crowds were tiny, and …
Read More “After City Group and Red Bull now a third group: it’s the future of football”
Women’s Champions League conclusion 2020 – a preview By Andrew Crawshaw It isn’t just the Men’s Champions League and Europa League competitions that are being played to a conclusion this month, The Women’s Champions League kicks off as well at the end of this week. Matches were played up to the quarter final stage before …
Read More “Women’s Champions League conclusion 2020 – a preview”
By Sir Hardly Anyone These are the days when working as a blogger or football journalist start to get a bit tough. News is so thin that most of it has to be made up (which come to think of it is life as normal) and many bloggers and journos are now reduced to plodding …
Read More “Salary cap plan, legal action, Sanllehi warning, Man C’s money and Philippe Senderos”
By Tony Attwood OK we are still a little way away from the start of the new season (it is September 12 in case you missed the announcement) and even longer before the transfer window closes with international transfers needing to be done by 11pm on Monday 5 October, and domestic transfers by 5pm on …
Read More “How does the league table part way through a season predict the final position>”
by Tony Attwood An article on the Guardian website finally recognises the bias of referees, but yet again refuses to draw the obvious conclusions about PGMO, so that at the end the only question I was left asking was, “What pressure is PGMO putting on the media not to question their utter and absolute authority?” …
Read More “Excellent newspaper article proves ref bias and points to media complicity in hiding it”
By Tony Attwood In essence, to work, revolutions have to be sold to the people. Either because as in Paris in 1789 the people topple a regime so unpopular it didn’t even like itself, or because a leader convinces everyone that change is needed and this is the way to do it. (One thinks perhaps …
Read More “Arsenal’s policy of constant revolution might be working…”
By Tony Attwood With the lock down on coverage of the Fifa scandal by the English media pretty much 100% effective, there has been the feeling that we need something really spooky to stir a bit more life into the scandal, while all the sides prepare their notes, questions, explanations and bare-faced lying for the …
By Tony Attwood “Untold” doesn’t mean “unfinished” and in fact we don’t like unfinished stories. And so much celebration is to be seen in Untold’s basement office as we announce the end of the story we first reported on 30 March concerning our old chum Johann Djourou. Now I know that four and a half …
Read More “Djourou finishes his legal case against his last club; no news of Alex Song.”
by Tony Attwood The Daily Telegraph is a newspaper that supports the Conservative Party, wholesale. It could no more recommend its readers to vote Labour than it could suggest that in the next election the Workers Revolutionary Party offers a viable alternative to the current government. And yet, despite this, the newspaper can and will …
Read More “Attacking your paymasters is possible for journalists, but not in football”
By Graham Jones Arsenal finished the 2019/20 season on a high by winning the FA Cup. They came from a goal behind to defeat Chelsea 2-1 and not only win a trophy for the first time since 2017 but also qualify for Europe. The fans and players would rather have qualified for the Champions League …
Read More “Where do Arsenal Need to Strengthen Ahead of the 20/21 Season?”
By Tony Attwood It’s another “Knock Arsenal” day in several newspapers. Here’s just one example… According to the Mail, one of several papers running the story of the Willian transfer, he will earn £220,000 a week at Arsenal. This gives him an cost of £34.32m over three years. There is nothing to pay for the …
Read More “Newspaper launches another fierce (and misleading) attack on Arsenal”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The re-opening of the pubs has been good for publicans but bad for those people seeking some real live news of who if anyone Arsenal might sign, because as the pints keep on pouring down the throats so the names just keep on rolling out. Six more players to join Arsenal …
Read More “The 128 players tipped to be coming to Arsenal, by a journalist near you.”
by Tony Attwood This piece follows on from “Fifa in chaos. England is silent but Europe is up in arms” We ended y esterday with Infantino not only being investigated for corruption in terms of Fifa and using Fifa’s money but also being investigated for incitement to treason. Infantino is meanwhile also trying to convince …
Read More “Fifa’s corruption in detail and why the English media won’t touch it”
By Tony Attwood Fifa has just gone into the transfer business. In fact they have just brought in a whole new squad. A squad of new lawyers who claim that there is no suspicion of Gianni Infantino having done anything wrong, but rather that, for the good of Fifa, he needs defending against a rampant …
Read More “Fifa in chaos. England is silent but Europe is up in arms”
By Tony Attwood This article originally included a quote of the number of VAR events per game in the PL, with the wrong figure quoted. The error (totally mine – I blame sticky hands on the calculator) doesn’t affect the key argument that the PL games there is a much higher level of VAR corrections …
Read More “PL refs make almost 3 times as many errors per game as Swiss refs. Why?”
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”
