A guest post today from DogFace, who explains all: Hello all, you may or may not remember me from times past – I used to write for a rival blog a few years ago and got good numbers too. I was the chap who started RefWatch, a statistical exploration into referee bias – crazy days…

I was trying to explain this on twitter, but Uefa don’t really do things in a way that facilitates explanation in 140 characters. WARNING: YOU MAY FIND THE FOLLOWING VERY BORING.  The Champions League prize money is not straightforward, as amounts are awarded based on several different factors: how far teams get in the competition…

Progress is a big thing in football these days. You can’t be seen to stand still, and heaven forbid you should get worse. Have Arsenal made progress this season? Let’s consult the handy Progressometer that I invented last year. The criteria are simple: Has league position gone up? Has the points tally gone up? If…

In the last 24 hours at least three national newspapers wrote about a report on Arsenal’s finances that’s just been published by an investment house called CSS. This report claimed that Arsenal would have only around £4m to spend in the summer transfer window, unless they took advantage of a £50m overdraft facility that, as…

I love stats that tell a story, but I hate it when people claim a real story is wrong because the stats say it should be. I saw a tweet from a Spurs fan, who I won’t name, that said his team have been unlucky this season. His reasoning was this: “Spurs are top for…

Apparently, according to ‘sources’ (probably his agent) Man City want to buy Theo Walcott this summer. Man City – which means Pep Guardiola wants to buy him! I consider this unlikely. For one thing they have Sterling already, who is of similar development as a player but far younger, and secondly Theo just isn’t good…

There has been a bit of interest in Arsenal shareholdings in recent days, due to the fact that Alisher Usmanov has now become the sole owner of 30.04% or Arsenal shares. What’s going on, you may well have wondered for about half a nano-second. In case you’re still wondering, here are all the facts you…

It’s my now traditional update on Arsenal’s mega-cash balance. Bit of an anti-climax to be honest: slightly lower than this time last year, and that was after spending only £10m last summer on Cech, as opposed to the £30m+ on Sanchez the previous year, and £40m+ on Ozil the year before. However, the big transfers…

After the two worst seasons in half a century, with League finishing positions of 16th and 17th, a new era dawned at Arsenal in the long hot summer of 1976: former Arsenal player and captain – and more recently Spurs Manager – Terry Neill was appointed to replace the retiring Bertie Mee. But Neill was…

As the 1975-76 season started, with Arsenal having finished 1974-75 in a lowly 16th place, even Chairman Denis Hill-Wood was not brimming with confidence, writing in the first programme: “We must all be rather anxious about what is in store for us.” However, he ended his message with the words: “I am confident that the…