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 Bulldog Drummond It has been a long, long time since the media were so united in their vision that Arsenal were in really deep trouble. No one is actually promising relegation, but some are getting quite close to that. But let’s look back at Brentford’s final run of top division games. Date Match Res …
Read More “Will the negativity surrounding Arsenal bring AFC down, or can we rise up tonight?”
By Bulldog Drummond Now you might be a little disinclined to call Brentford “Arsenal’s bogey team” but Brentford seriously were the team that amazingly caused Arsenal a lot of problems the last time we played them regularly. Brentford arose from League Division Two to the first division in 1935 when Arsenal were absolutely the dominant …
Read More “Why Brentford are Arsenal’s bogey team: but hopefully not today”
By Bulldog Drummond I wonder if anyone in the media is getting a bit worried. I mean, they have gone down this route of utterly ignoring what has happened in terms of the tactics of tackling, and refused to acknowledge what happened to Arsenal over the last two thirds of last season and now they …
Read More “Brentford v Arsenal, the Premier League in code, and gibberish from the Mirror.”
By Bulldog Drummond Tackling is a matter of contention in the Premier League, as we discovered after we observed the antics of Leicester City in the season before last. Leicester, you may recall, took tackling to an industrial level in 2019/20 and got away with it for a while – then were suddenly reigned in …
Read More “Arsenal kick off the league season against Brentford. It’s going to be rough!”
This is part two of our list of the 131 players being tipped to come our way this summer. If you would like to know what happened to the 134 players tipped last summer, we’ve done a complete analysis, showing how many didn’t move at all, how many went to our rivals and how many …
Read More “Arsenal transfers this summer: players 69 to 131”
Arsenal have now been tipped to bring in 131 players this summer, just three short of last season’s record total of 134. Here’s the list for players 1 to 68, with the rest to follow shortly. No Player Current club Position Reported by 1 Patrick van Aanholt Ex Palace Left Back …
Read More “Arsenal just three players short of last season’s transfer record”
By Ynot Doowtta and Ehpotsirhc Tsoj As we all know, Messi was available to any club that wanted him on a free transfer, what with Barcelona not being able to complete the re-signing arrangements allegedly because of the way the Spanish League’s wage control structure works (although recent reports have said they could have done …
Read More “Why Arsenal made a big mistake not signing Messi”
By Tony Attwood You might recall that for some time Untold has been one of the very few media outlets in the UK that has seriously covered the investigation into the activities of Fifa President Gianni Infantino. Then we stopped, because the investigation stopped. What happened was that Stefan Keller was removed from his position …
Read More “Infantino and his village gang get his prosecutor thrown off the case!”
By Tony Attwood Although it might not seem a particular concern to England, there has been a scheme in Cyprus known as “golden passports.” It is a scheme in which foreign investors are able to get Cypriot passports in return for investment in Cyprus, and has (according to Al Jazeera) attracted numerous investors, dozens of …
Read More “Money laundering scandal via English football re-emerges: media stays quiet”
by Tony Attwood Step by step it has been happened and now we’ve had a little breakthrough True a tiny tiny tiny breakthrough, and not one that has been sustained, but still a breakthrough, The Guardian says of Arsenal “Their nightmare period last season came earlier, in the run-up to Christmas – five points …
Read More “The media admit that AFC got better last season but still ignore the data”
By Count Emup If you have been reading Untold through the summer you’ll know that a central point we have been making is that if one calculates the league table for clubs from Christmas Day onward last season, Arsenal were second. That of course may sound nonsense since as some respondents on other sites have …
Read More “Is it true that Arsenal were only 4th over the last 10 games last season?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone If there is something that bedevils professional football in England and reduces the sport to the level of a total laughing stock it is the fake transfer. If there is another thing it is the newspapers with totally misleading analyses and statistics. And so praise to the Athletic that has decided …
By Tony Attwood To suggest that the Charity Shield, the first big game of the season, was affected by “fan fatigue” seems to be pushing it a bit, but that is what the Guardian did. Of what were fans supposed to be fatigued? The notion that, “The bad news is that, if this Community Shield …
Read More “Was last season a shoddy campaign or a transformational experience?”
by Bulldog Drummond Next up we have the issue of goal line technology and whether it is working. As we know, had Arsenal remembered to turn their goal line gubbins on, we would have drawn 2-2 with Chelsea since the ball was clearly over the line for Arsenal’s second. Not turning it on for last …
By Bulldog Drummond On the left is a picture of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which still, as far as I know, doesn’t have a sponsor’s name attached. Not sure if that is a deliberate ploy so that the name of the ground is not sullied by mere commercial interest, or because no one is interested. …
Read More “Tottenham v Arsenal: the anti-Arsenal Arsenal rage on: we need a keeper”
The story so far… Tottenham H v Arsenal; covid passes at the ready but will it delay entry? How Tottenham used the Leicester’s model to become masters of the gentle tackle By Bulldog Drummond Tottenham beat us to seventh place by a point last season of course – and if you are a regular reader …
Read More “Tottenham v Arsenal: last season’s improvement and the home / away record”
By Bulldog Drummond Previously: How Tottenham used the Leicester’s model to become masters of the gentle tackle Tottenham Hotspur will be “trialing the use of the NHS COVID Pass to verify the vaccination or COVID status of supporters attending our men’s and women’s matches against Arsenal on Sunday.” [The spelling mistake is a Tottenham website …
Read More “Tottenham H v Arsenal; covid passes at the ready but will it delay entry?”
By Bulldog Drummond Over the past ten years Tottenham, in league games, have committed 4031 fouls, compared to 3767 fouls committed by Arsenal. A difference of 7% more fouls by Tottenham. Hardly significant. In terms of yellow cards Tottenham have had 618 and Arsenal 591, meaning Tottenham have had 4% more yellow cards than Arsenal. …
Read More “How Tottenham used the Leicester’s model to become masters of the gentle tackle”
By Bulldog Drummond By my reckoning, and I am often wrong with this sort of thing, Arsenal have room for two more players in their 25 man squad next season. And if the story about Joe Willock going to Newcastle today to sign another deal with them, we have three places. Here is the squad …
Read More “The 25 man squad updated, and the game against Boreham Wood”
By Tony Attwood When Arsenal started winning League titles and FA Cups in the 1930s they broke the hegemony of the clubs of the West Midlands and the north who had won most of the trophies until that point. Arsenal’s reward was to be named by the media the “Bank of England” club, and football …
Read More “Football’s tactical revolution is being led by Arsenal – but where might it take us?”
By Tony Attwood The top two divisions in Spanish football, which together are known as “La Liga” have sold 10% of themselves to the private equity and credit company CVC Capital Partners. The arrangement means that “La Liga” will get €2.7bn (which is currently about £2.3bn) and this is thought to be the first time …
Read More “The Spanish league sells part of itself in order to keep operating. But….”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal were ninth in the goalscoring table last season, which doesn’t sound that good – although maybe what you would expect that since we finished the league season in eighth place. But it perhaps is also slightly less ungood than you might imagine when you note that we only scored three …
Read More “How can Arsenal up their goalscoring this coming season?”
By Tony Attwood One of the arguments often made against articles published in Untold Arsenal is that the data that we have doesn’t prove that something odd is happening, or that something is amiss with the way in which football works. And generally speaking I agree. We don’t have the resources to prove that anything …
Read More “There’s no proof of corruption in the PL, it is just that some things are rather odd.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Journalists’ failure rate reaches a staggering 96%. Would any other industry accept such a level of failure? We know that the overwhelming majority of transfers that journalists and bloggers predict never come to pass. But sitting in the Toppled Bollard public house in Docklands, we began to wonder what actually happened …
Read More “What happened to the 134 players said to be coming to Arsenal last summer?”
By Tony Attwood There is a general perception that teams that do well, foul the least. But as Evelyn Waugh might have said, that is true “Up to a point” – meaning that actually isn’t really true. Some of the teams that did rather well last season, achieved their success in part at least by …
Read More “Behold: The dirtiest teams in the PL last season; and the one that were fouled the most”
