AISA Arsenal History Society: preserving Arsenal's heritage
by Tony Attwood One of the central factors in Sir Henry Norris’ tenure as chairman of Arsenal was making the club break even. When he took it over, it was massively in debt – a debt which Sir Henry himself cleared. From that point on, making a profit was his key aim, for his belief …
Read More “When Arsenal hired entertainers as part of the team”
by Tony Attwood We are used to contemporary reports appearing about footballers who despite their talent are troubled souls, having disputes with their club, being involved in dubious activities that bring them to the attention of the law, leaving clubs after a row, going absent without permission from the club… But few can equal Henry …
by Tony Attwood For many people history is just the dry recording of facts, and I get a regular stream of correspondence telling me that I should be more concerned about Arsenal in the present day than bothering with all this history stuff. But I find history interesting, and over the years it has given …
Read More “Searching out the location of Arsenal’s first FA Cup match”
by Tony Attwood One of the most fascinating results of studying Arsenal’s history is just how commonly held views about the club’s past turn out to be utterly untrue. For example, it is reported in many histories of the club that after Arsenal turned professional in 1893, one way or another all the local clubs …
Read More “The falsification of Arsenal’s history by repeating what the last guy said”
This is the day in Arsenal’s history in 1925 when supposedly a conversation took place between manager Herbert Chapman and club captain Charlie Buchan as to how the club could counter the approach teams were taking to the new offside law introduced in the summer of 1925. The rule change meant that only two men …
Read More “One of the famous stories about Arsenal turns out not to be true at all.”
It is not just the fact that some clubs play a more industrial style of football than Arsenal it is also the way in which some managers are able to get away with saying anything they like about referees, while if an Arsenal manager speaks in that way, he is immediately hauled up before the …
Read More “There are managers who can question referees, and those who have to stay silent”
As a player at Arsenal Alan Smith was widely admired. A George Graham purchase he delivered as a centre forward in as much as he scored 86 goals in 264 games. Not the very best centre forward rate, but still a very welcome input into the team. After retiring he took up journalism, appearing on …
Read More “The ex-Arsenal player who gained access to the club and then went too far”
On this day in 1892 the man who wrote the column about Woolwich Arsenal FC in the Woolwich Gazette, issued a complaint about how everyone always disagreed with him. How different that is from today, where the newspapers, broadcasters and bloggers all seek to find common ground and argue that Arsenal is in a desperate …
Read More “How the role of the football journalist has inverted itself.”
Richard Wright is remembered as a backup goalkeeper in the Arsenal title winning team of 2001/2, playing 12 games – enough to get him a medal. He made his debut on this day in 2001. Later in his career he was with Manchester City, but despite four years with the club as a player, never …
Read More “Arsenal’s title winning keeper who kept signing, but hardly played”
28 September 2002 is a day that should be commemorated at Arsenal as one of its great anniversaries because this is the day when not only were records broken, but the world of football woke up to what a truly fantastic team Arsenal had built. Of course the journalists, tutored in years of knocking Arsenal, …
Read More “The day Arsenal went beyond the concept of Total Football”
It may be hard to imagine but by the mid 1970s the national media were so transfixed by issues relating to player contracts that they hardly bothered to mention, let alone report, north London derby matches. And indeed the crowd seemed to feel much the same way with under 38,000 attending the game on this …
Read More “When Arsenal played Tottenham in the 70s and no one was really interested”
A lot of football history consists of one writer taking as gospel what a previous writer has said, rather than anyone either going back and checking facts, or asking “is that actually likely?” These two approaches were used by the little group of us who formed the Arsenal History Society and the work has resulted …
Read More “How we discovered that Arsenal’s early history had been wrongly recorded”
Arsenal’s move from Plumstead to Highbury was not universally liked, and many local residents and shop keepers in Islington objected strongly, even forming a “Defence Committee” and demanding that the local council stop the move. It was a rather futile approach since the power of the local authority to stop the development of the unwanted …
Read More “Islington council accused of trying to crush Arsenal out of existence”
by Tony Attwood Having studied a bit of football history over the years I would always say, “don’t predict tomorrow in football, because of what happened today.” For example, the footballing world was fairly shocked when Leicester won the League in 2016 and journalists jostled with each other for hyperbole. “The greatest footballing story of …
Read More “Football history is full of strange rises and falls”
by Tony Attwood Tottenham’s objections to Arsenal moving to north London were incredibly strong and quite possibly ill-judged, given that Arsenal had been the club which had saved Tottenham when they had opted out of the Southern League, but then failed to be given a place in the Football League. In the re-run of the …
Read More “When Tottenham were found guilty of bad language and the stadium curse”
By Tony Attwood I have not been able to find in reference books a definitive statement concerning the Arsenal player who has scored in the largest consecutive number of goals in league games for the club, but I suspect it was Reg Lewis who scored for six games in a row at the start of …
Read More “Scoring in the longest run of consecutive games. Who holds the record?”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal’s motto “Victoria Concordia Crescit” was used in the club programme on this day for the first time in 1913, as part of generating a new spirit of togetherness in the club’s first months at Highbury. It translates as Victory through Harmony, and it is impossible to believe that many of the …
Read More “How many bloggers and fans actually know what Arsenal’s motto is”
The notion that Arsenal might take on the media and complain about the way they report the club probably seems very fanciful these days. After all, even when all the media had taken up the notion that Arsenal only had a budget of £40m this summer, the club did not respond – except when asked …
Read More “When Arsenal were so outraged by the media that they denounced the reporting”
I think many people who were not there at the time now assume that Thierry Henry was a success for Arsenal from the moment he came on the pitch for the first time, but this was far from being the case. Henry had to get used to his fellow Arsenal players, the tactics of defences …
Read More “Even Thierry Henry struggled to adjust to the Premier League at the start.”
Adebayor, who on this day in 2006 scored for Arsenal, is not exactly remembered fondly by Arsenal fans because of his exploits in leaving the club and what he did later, but the extraordinary thing about his was that when he was playing, in 104 games he got 46 goals. A ratio of 0.44 goals …
Read More “The strange behaviour and goalscoring decline of Adebayor”
On this day in 2014 Hector Bellerín made his Champions League debut for Arsenal having made the briefest of league cup appearances for Arsenal the season before. Following this game, and after a 2-0 defeat by Chelsea on 5 October Arsenal were in 8th position and again there was the usual ill-informed talk of the …
Read More “When the critics turned on Bellerin and said he should never play for Arsenal again.”
Did Osama bin Laden support, the head of Al Qaeda, actually support Arsenal? Bin Laden is most well known for his role in masterminding the September 11 attacks, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 and prompted the United States to initiate the War on Terror. But did he actually attend some games at the Clock …
Looking at that question you might think the answer is either going to be a game against Tottenham, or a game against Leyton Orient. Or maybe Clapton Orient. Or there again against Tottenham in the first world war when they played on our ground. But no, let’s get rid of the war time games and …
The media of course love to highlight controversy – it gives them something to write about and fill the space without having to do any research at all. It also gets the audience excited, anxious to read the latest instalment. But when a supposedly serious newspaper launches into an attack on a player, finding him …
Read More “When the media attempt to influence football’s decisions we are all in trouble”
In 1952/3 Arsenal won the first division title under Tom Whittaker’s management. It meant he had won the league title twice as Arsenal’s manager, and won the FA Cup – exactly the same as achieved by Herbert Chapman and George Allison before him. What’s more in his six years as manager the club had never …
Read More “When one of the great Arsenal sides inexplicably fell apart”
