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 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”
By Sir Hardly Anyone On this page we have rumours number 65 to 124, making this now the transfer window with the most rumours ever since we started covering them about 12 years ago. What’s interesting is just how shameless this all is. The newspapers and websites that come up with these stories know that …
Read More “Arsenal’s 124 players we are signing this window: K to Z”
By Sir Hardly Anyone I noticed this little quote the other day: “The Arsenal management’s inability to manage the squad, manage transfers, and inspire trust is obvious to anyone watching.” (Just Arsenal). But given that there are now 124 players coming to Arsenal, according to the blogs and newspapers, surely the true quote ought to be …
Read More “Arsenal now tipped by all-knowing pundits to be signing 124 new players”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The media’s aim is to make Arsenal look stupid and to suggest that they (the media) know more than the lollipops running the club. It’s not a conspiracy, just a cheap way of filling the media space, and since the fans get little news from the club, this makes some fans …
Read More “The strange story of Leno, Martinez, Ramsdale and an out-of-work Spurs player”
by Sir Hardly Anyone The transfer window slams shut (please note it never closes, but it always slams shut) on Tuesday, 31 August at 23:00 BST. And currently rather a large number of clubs are getting rather worried for a variety of reasons. The problem is that of financial projections – which basically means clubs …
Read More “What’s gone wrong in the transfer market? In essence, everything.”
By Tony Attwood “I think we showed some really positive stuff and some worrying stuff when we gave the ball away in difficult positions, and when we had to do defensive organisation, it opened spaces in difficult moments. “For what we could do against that team and where we are in pre-season, I think it …
Read More “How “I think that was positive” was turned into “Arteta’s worried” by the media”
By Tony Attwood Throughout the last couple of months the media have kept up the incessant talk that all is not well at Arsenal and major reforms are now required to the playing squad, and quite possibly the backroom staff as well. Yesterday a 1500 word article on Arsenal appeared in the Guardian analysing their …
Read More “Newpaper reports show journalists’ failure to grasp what’s happening at Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood You may read that this was a 1-2 victory to Chelsea but actually Arsenal scored two perfectly reasonable goals. However, one was ruled not a goal because the ref, who was standing about 12 yards from the goal line, couldn’t tell if the ball had gone over the line. It had, beyond …
Read More “Arsenal 2 Chelsea 2 (Arsenal deducted one goal because of tech incompetence)”
