It was an upstairs room of Arsenal’s training ground, October 2009, and I imagine I am not the only person in this profession who has sat opposite Nicklas Bendtner, listening to him setting out his master plan and wondered if he might be in danger of running out of breath, such was the energy he put into blowing his own trumpet.
There is nothing wrong with a touch of ego, of course, in professional sport, but it was still slightly startling to hear a player of 21 so dedicated to the idea that nothing could possibly stop him becoming one of the greats of his sport. “In my opinion I don’t know why anyone would question me,” he said. “Trust me, it will happen. I look around at other players, I see my own ability and I can’t see anything that tells me it won’t happen. I’m sure people will think: ‘What is he talking about?’ But as I have done before, and will do again, I will laugh at those people when it is all done.”
This wasn’t an act, either. Jacques Crevoisier, Arsenal’s psychologist, once gave an interview to the Swedish magazine Offside that neatly sums up the way Bendtner is wired differently to the rest of us. Crevoisier used to give the players a series of multiple-choice questions to test their intelligence and personality. “One of the categories is called ‘Self-perceived competence’ – ie how good the player himself thinks he is,” he explained. “On a scale of up to nine, Bendtner got a 10. We had never seen that before. When Bendtner misses a chance, he is always genuinely convinced it isn’t his fault. You might say that’s a problem, and to a certain degree it can be. But you can also view it as this guy has a remarkable ability to come back after setbacks.”
The ego is formidable and it always strikes me as somewhat strange that the Scandinavian countries, not necessarily the first place you would imagine finding this kind of braggadocio, have produced so many of the sport’s more prolific show‑offs. Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s levels of self-adoration hardly fit in with PJ O’Rourke’s rather cruel description of Swedes as “tedious, clean-living Boy Scout types” and anyone who has interviewed John Guidetti can probably vouch that is an interesting experience, too. Guidetti once told me, while on loan at Stoke City, of his own ambitions to become the greatest footballer on Earth and that he might open a florist one day, call it Flowers for Doubters and send bouquets to all the people who had doubted him. He has scored a few goals for Celta Vigo but it is difficult to shake the suspicion, much like Bendtner, that sometimes it is the people in the thickest fog who blow their horn the loudest.
Unfortunately for Bendtner, anyone this cocksure probably has to understand there might not be too much public sympathy when everything unravels and the boasts look incredibly empty. Bendtner certainly set himself up for a fall. It has been a long way down and his reputation has been damaged to a point where he cannot be too surprised if many of the people who have followed the trajectory of his career suspect his return to English football might follow the same direction. One poll in BT, the Danish newspaper, has 57% predicting he will continue to slide at Nottingham Forest and Allan Olsen, sports editor of Ekstra Bladet, did not sound too hopeful, either. “Let us wait to see if Bendtner realises this is his last chance to get rid of his joker aura,” he wrote. “Hopefully he will take his new surroundings and his own talent seriously. For where do you go after you’ve failed in the Championship?”
The same place, presumably, where Bendtner has been for the last few months – out of work. Bendtner has already been ostracised by the Danish national team. He was moved out of Wolfsburg because, in the words of the sporting director, Klaus Allofs, he was “a menace to the club” and there have been so many lost nights and misdemeanours it suggests Bendtner did not receive the memo that modern‑day footballers do not get to the very top unless they are absolutely dedicated to their profession.
For a player with such immense self-regard, the fact is Bendtner turns 29 in January and has made a total of 77 top-flight starts, almost a third of which came during a loan arrangement at Sunderland in 2011-12. There has been only one occasion, on loan to Birmingham City, when he has scored more than 10 goals in a season, and he was a teenager at the time. That was 10 years ago and if he cannot take this latest chance, arguably the last he will get, he is in danger of becoming the internet’s mandatory pick for one of the centre-forward positions in a Slapstick XI. “Social media, and the way the internet works, you see a lot of funny things,” Bendtner said at his introductory press conference. Maybe he was referring to the time Emmanuel Frimpong, his former Arsenal team‑mate, superimposed Bendtner’s head on a photograph of Lionel Messi winning the Ballon d’Or. Otherwise it hasn’t really been that funny. It isn’t difficult to find the compilation videos online – Lord Bendtner’s Funny Moments and so on – and for the most part they are laughing at him, rather than with him.
All that said, we are still talking about a striker who might surprise a few people if – and this, perhaps, is the most pertinent question – he can realign his priorities and has the intelligence and professional pride to realise he is in danger of turning a once-promising career into a permanent source of regret. Does it hurt that he has made 72 appearances for his country and is joint seventh in their all-time list of scorers, yet when Denmark failed to qualify for Euro 2016 he was unwanted? Does he realise there is nothing quite so demoralising for followers of sport than watching someone fritter away their gifts? And if he were to take Crevoisier’s test now, would he recognise that it is not everybody else’s fault, after all?
If the answer is yes to all those questions that at least is a reasonable place to start. Bendtner will never be as good as he thought he would be but, if we are looking for clues about how determined he is to put it right, there is a glimmer of hope from the fact he has spent his time out of the game training with FC Copenhagen to keep in shape.
Bendtner has the potential to score goals and remind us why he has played in the Champions League in seven out of the last nine seasons, why Arsène Wenger kept faith in him for so long at Arsenal and why Antonio Conte once signed him for Juventus.
The best policy for now, however, is probably to keep an open mind and remember that “potentia’”, as Sir Alex Ferguson once said, can be a dangerous word in football. “I kept hearing about the potential of this guy when I first came to United,” Ferguson once said of Peter Barnes. “Everyone was telling me he had such great potential. Jesus Christ, he was 30 years old.”
At last some cough it up for Kick It Out
A while ago, I wrote that it was no use complaining about Kick It Out not being the organisation it should be unless we looked at the principal reasons stopping it from expansion.
At the time, the Premier League paid £125,000 every year to keep the sport’s most prominent anti-racism group ticking over. The Football Association and the Professional Footballers’ Association chipped in the same – and the Football League, having not put in a penny for many seasons, was finally persuaded to start contributing a few years ago.
In total, that meant core funding of £500,000 a year, from which Kick It Out had to budget for everything, including the salaries of the 13 members of staff working from an unpretentious fourth-floor office above a pizza restaurant in Clerkenwell. Nobody should have been surprised, with that as the starting point, that an operation this small has had to be bailed out financially more than once.
Good news, anyway. The Premier League, I’m reliably informed, has now bumped up its core funding to £279,000 this season, £269,000 next year and £259,000 the one after that. It still could be more, coming in at around 0.003% of the new television deal, but it will make a difference, especially when the FA has offered to increase its own contribution with another £40,000 a year for project costs.
It is a pity, though, that the Football League has not followed the trend when all of its 72 clubs will benefit. As for the PFA, Gordon Taylor and his chums have also decided against increasing their contribution – though, in fairness, they have other priorities, presumably, with their impending move into swanky new offices in London’s insurance district (cost £5.2m).
Comfort turns to cruelty for lions
Without wishing to bring up too many bad memories, did you realise that England’s cuddly and much-missed lions – Kit, Cee and Leo, if you would rather be on first‑name terms – were given their own seats when Roy Hodgson’s squad boarded their plane to fly out to Euro 2016?
It actually gets worse. England’s fluffy mascots also had their own inflatable headrests to ensure a comfy flight, blissfully unaware at that point that they would be stuffed into a metal crate when the squad flew back to Luton airport a few weeks later, minus a manager, to a welcoming committee comprising of several photographers and one tabloid journalist (on a mission, apparently, to hand the players some stuffed donkeys wrapped in Iceland carrier bags).
No doubt you have your own memories. You might remember the television pictures of the players disembarking their plane, on the day after losing to Iceland, and the small army of women in fluorescent jackets rushing to their sides, umbrellas open, in case Jamie Vardy, Joe Hart and all the other returning heroes were assaulted by a few droplets of rain.
A personal one was the little scene, back in Chantilly, where a clean-up operation was under way at the hotel England’s players had just vacated. Everything was being loaded in the back of a van and someone asked why the vehicle did not have any Football Association branding. The driver wanted it that way, we were told, to spare his embarrassment on the long drive home.
It is against this kind of backdrop that the FA, permanently bewildered by the accusations of arrogance in English football, keeps a clock at St George’s Park ticking down to the day England win the 2022 World Cup. “That clock’s daft,” Greg Clarke, the FA’s new chairman, volunteered on his first public engagement in the role this past week. And, finally, someone in authority had dared say it. In one short sentence, Clarke has made a fine start.
