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Arsenal News

The origin of wholesale corruption in football

Today’s Sponsor: “Making the Arsenal” – the most original book on Arsenal FC ever.
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Today if an Arsenal supporter ever does think of Preston North End, it might be in the knowledge that they were the first Invincibles – unbeaten in the very first season of league football.   With the black and white 19th century [...]

11th April 1910. The football world cries

Woolwich Arsenal 1, Aston Villa 0.

Played early monday evening, in front of a crowd of just 8000.   And certain sectors of the footballing establishment went beserk.

If you have read the report of the game from two days before when Woolwich Arsenal drew with low-lying Bury, you’ll know that it left the table looking like this…

Bury………………..… Played [...]

The Dark History of Tottenham Hotspur

Tottenham Hotspur: the dark history

How an underhand strategy and a desire to rewrite history has transformed how people think about football in London.

To begin, somewhere near the start…

In 1882, the Hotspur Football Club was formed by a group of school boys attending a Bible class at All Hallows Church.

Tottenham’s aim early on, like so many clubs [...]

London football in crisis: but only two can go down. Chelsea v Arsenal 1910.

100 years ago London had three Division I clubs – Woolwich Arsenal (who were actually in a small town in Kent), Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur.

All three were having a tough time of it, and the only things that were keeping all three from being relegated were

a) In those days, only two clubs went down

b) Bad as [...]

Preparing to meet Liverpool - the great match fixers

Apart from focusing on football one hundred years ago, this site looks back on the major events in history surrounding clubs we are about to play in the present day.

So this obviously is the moment to take a peek at the history of the infamous Reds and one of their misadventures.

On 2nd April, 1915, (Good Friday) [...]

The "fixed" promotion, the corruption and the match fixing. How the Football League does business

There was a rather strange comment on our sister site Untold Arsenal this week in which an Aston Villa fan said that Arsenal supporters have no right to comment on Villa  when in fact Arsenal had bribed their way into the first division in 1919.

I must admit I thought that the old Tiny Totts propaganda on [...]

A history of corruption in English football

On UNTOLD ARSENAL after the Chelsea game I wrote a piece in which I suggested that some matches in the English Premier League are fixed.  It is a debate that continues on that site.

But it made me think it might be worth a meander around the time that this site deals with, in terms [...]

UNTOLD ARSENAL raided by police, Ireland guilty, Platini arrested,

Sky News seem to have missed it, and it is not featuring on any of the blogs that I can see but the biggest match fixing scandal since 1914/15 is about to hit football.

Let’s do the history first, since this is primarily a history site – but I will move onto the current situation is a [...]