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 Arsenal were a different kettle of fish at home and away from home last season. In fact you may have seen me mention it before. At home Arsenal were the third best team in the league in term of points with a goal scoring difference of +26. Away from home Arsenal were …
Read More “Was the difference between Arsenal’s home and away form really that unusual?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Background noise The players listed below aren’t all coming to Arsenal of course, nor are all of the 21 shown as leaving actually leaving, but these are the names of players that individual blogs and newspapers are claiming one way or another are coming our way or wandering away. So just …
Read More “Satire: The 59 players tipped by the media to be coming to Arsenal and 21 leaving”
By Tony Attwood I have seen it argued that managers often do better in their second season at a club than in their first, as by the second season they have got to understand the players in the squad and been able to bring in new players to suit their style of play. Thus Mr …
Read More “Historically Arsenal managers mostly face a 2nd season malaise. Emery must beware!”
By Sir Hardly Anyone This is the fourth summer running that we have run our transfer rumours index, each time showing that around 97% of the supposed deals never happen. Indeed as far as we can tell, they were never going to happen, but were in fact just fantasies invented by writers looking for an …
Read More “National news website agrees story about Arsenal transfer was obvious fake”
By Tony Attwood On 27 May 2015 Untold ran this headline If Fifa execs had read Untold in January they would have known they were going to be arrested That story related back to our piece on 22 January that year which itself had the headline Switzerland take a greater interest in …
Read More “Fifa corruption as rife as ever, but English tax payers keep funding them.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Three players at once? Yes if you believe the media. But then, on the other hand, if you believe the media then you believe, well, just about anything. Including the fact that we are currently trying to sign 54 players. But I thought it might be fun to put these three …
Read More “Arsenal sign Saliba, Alexis and Gabriel all at once”
By Sir Hardly Anyone We often report that 3% of all transfer rumours end up being correct – but this number would be far lower than this were it not for the fact that we include rumours that suddenly emerge en masse just a few days before an actual signing. One such event looks like …
Read More “8 more players heading for Arsenal and 3 more leaving. Plus coaching shake up.”
Research by Andrew Crawshaw, opinions by Tony Attwood The FA have for years been trying to break away from the EU imposed rule of allowing EU players from all nationalities to play for clubs without restriction. UEFA introduced the rule at the start of the 2006/07 football season requiring that all teams entering European club …
Read More “Cohen and his Englishness: the most bonkers neo-nationalistic FA story ever”
By Tony Attwood As you may have read in the media, an Arsenal academy coach has been fined and banned for three matches having called a female teenage referee “little prick,” at the end of a game for Under 9s. He was charged with using improper language and behaviour towards a referee and insulting the …
By Tony Attwood Recently one of the most read Arsenal stories doing the rounds on the internet was “Arsenal would commit the biggest transfer blunder by signing this 26-year-old flop even though it is for free.” The story appeared in Media Referee and came with the sub heading “Gunners should drop their interest in …
Read More “Arsenal transfer commentary language changes: now the pundits know best”
By Tony Attwood David Dein was the Arsenal director who introduced Arsène Wenger to Arsenal, and ultimately recruited him as Arsenal’s manager. When Dein resigned as a director it was a huge shock to Mr Wenger, and to most Arsenal watchers. And indeed a few of us were very fearful at the time as to …
Read More “David Dein’s prison project: the positive story of football putting something back.”
by Andrew Crawshaw So far Arsenal have confirmed the departure of 10 players following the expiry of their contracts. Whilst many are well known, I have added my thoughts on the youngsters who you might not be as familiar with. Vontae Daley-Campbell a highly thought of Right Back and a mainstay of our U18 team …
By Tony Attwood You may recall that we recently undertook a bit of an analysis comparing Mr Emery’s first season at Arsenal with Mr Wenger’s last. The full report is here in case you missed it but the long and the short of the analysis was that at home we conceded the same number …
Read More “Mr Emery kept Arsenal stable in his first season, so what’s he going to do now?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Many people question why I hang around in public houses as derelict and beaten up as the Toppled Bollard on Wapping Swamp, talking to derelict and beaten up so-called football journalists in an attempt to find out who is going to transfer to Arsenal this week. And I must admit the …
Read More “This transfer makes no sense: worrying times indeed for Arsenal”
This article continues from the piece, “No Champs League again, but how are Arsenal going to turn this around?” published earlier today. It is 100 years since Arsenal were elected to the first division upon its expansion. Take out 11 years when football was not played, and we have been in the first division for …
Read More “Arsenal: 100 Years in the First Division – but what about more titles”
By Tony Attwood There was an interesting article recently by Nick Hornby which looks back at the past season and says, “We used to blame Wenger and the kinds of players he liked, the technically gifted, physically unimposing attacking midfielders who seemed to occupy every position on the pitch. Torreira, Granit Xhaka and Sokratis Papastathopoulos …
Read More “No Champs League again, but how are Arsenal going to turn this around?”
By Tony Attwood Every summer for the last few years we have charted the names of players who are touted by the newspapers and radio stations to be coming to Arsenal, and those who are leaving. Each year the total has got to over 100, with on average no more than 3% of the predictions …
Read More “44 players Arsenal are tipped to sign this summer; 16 are going.”
By Tony Attwood Looking back, as one does at this time of year, it was interesting to see how quickly the build up of excitement and enthusiasm in the media concerning the Champions League final dissipated. And it wasn’t just a feeling of regret that surrounded the Tottenham v Liverpool match in the media, it …
Read More “It’s going to be great, it was awful as we expected, Santi Cazorla and Leeds.”
By Tony Attwood . The last three posts have been talking about corruption in football. Where corruption is taking place on a major scale it ought to be possible to predict who is going to win the league, and have already mentioned in an earlier post that at the start of the 2018/19 season, Untold …
Read More “We predicted six champions before the season started. We got all six right.”
By Tony Attwood So far in this series: Is football fixed? Part 1: The logical reason why we might well think so. Is football fixed? Part II: why we need to have change I had already written the two previous “Football is Fixed” articles that appeared yesterday, when the news came in that the match …
Read More “Is football fixed? The final chapter: match fixing in Spain.”
By Tony Attwood This article concludes the discussion on why change is needed in the way football is run in the Premier League. As the Guardian pointed out, when Southampton were beaten 6-1 by Manchester City, the expected goals result suggested a 2-2 draw. And we say, ah well, stuff happens. Or we might …
Read More “Is football fixed? Part II: why we need to have change”
By Tony Attwood There are two answers to the notion that football is fixed, which journalists and bloggers like to trot out over and over again. The first is that the people who suggest football is fixed are simply loopy – that they go around wearing tin hats, believe that the BBC is the universal …
Read More “Is football fixed? Part 1: The logical reason why we might well think so.”
By Andrew Crawshaw The Women’s World Cup gets underway this coming Friday (7th June) when hosts France take on South Korea in the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. The semi finals and final will be held at the Parc Olympique Lyonnaise in Lyon. There are 24 countries taking part in six groups of four. …
by Blacksheep I must say, from the start, that I started this past season with low expectations. I thought we’d miss out on the top four (when Tony often said we’d make it). I expected we’d do better in the Europa League than last season because, well, history tends to suggest that a little …
By Tony Attwood In the 15 years since Arsenal’s unbeaten season – an event which has not yet been emulated of course – only four teams have won the Premier League: Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Leicester City. Noting this I thought it might be worth asking the question, “Does that mean that the …
Read More “Football is getting so predictable one season seems much like the last.”
