Friday, March 29, 2024

Job Hunt: Finding Niklas Bendtner A New Job

Here at Fresh Arsenal, we aren’t just another throwaway news site. We care about the club – and we care about the players! Sure, Ivan Gazidis can handle most things, but every now and then a task emerges that even he would struggle to cope with. And oh boy, has one emerged…

That “opgave” [task] – bit of Dutch there – is finding that lovable rogue, Nicklas Bendtner, a new job.

Released by Arsenal at the end of the 2013/14 season, poor old Nick has been out of luck. With no clubs battling for his signature, it looks like he might have to start the coming season stationed outside his local Jobcentre.

But fear not! Fresh Arsenal’s top Danish-Arsenal Relations Advisor, Jack Gillespie, is on the case!

Each week – or until Bendtner’s legal team have a word with me – I’ll be doing my best to find our beloved Saint Nick a new place of work.

To start with, I’d need to find a website with worldwide acclaim, a large following, and dozens of quality advertisements – so I closed down my Fresh Arsenal tab and headed over to Goal.com.

Five minutes in and I’d already found a way for Bendtner to make some cash. In the comment section of one of the articles, a young and suspiciously attractive woman told me I could make up to £4500 a month working from home. Lovely stuff! I clicked on the link she provided, but sadly had to download something called “malware” before the webpage would load – probably a new version of Java. No worries – I kept it running in the background as I searched for more openings.

As I was searching through a few more ads, my monitor went black. After booting my PC back up, I was greeted with an anti-virus notification. My computer had somehow contracted 1147 Trojan horse viruses. Talk about bad luck! It must have been Goal.com’s servers. That’s the last time I visit that pile of garbage! *

So, with my high-tech-Danish-job-seeking equipment disabled, I had to take to the streets.

My first port of call was my local hairdressers. We all know Nicklas loves a swanky trim, so this one was a no-brainer. I located the manager and began flogging my client.

Is he interested in hair? Of course! Does he have previous training? Duh! Does he have a criminal record? Of course not (touch wood). Even if he did, many companies are using something like these Minnesota criminal background checks to verify if any potential employees have a criminal background. I’m hoping that he doesn’t, as this job could be the perfect one for him. If I’m being honest, I was storming the whole “get this average footballer a job” gig.

And then came the big one. The manager tells me he’s been having problems with male workers getting a bit too close to his customers. They’d been sealing the deal; bumping the nasties; hiding the sausage – if you catch my drift.

For anyone that didn’t catch my drift – they’d been having sexual intercourse.

I couldn’t believe my luck! I assured the manager that my client couldn’t score if he tried! He looked pleased. We shook hands and I left the shop. It was a done deal.

When I got home, I gave Bendtner a call to tell him the good news. He was furious! He told me that he wanted to be playing for a football club – not chopping off some girl’s bush – that one wasn’t a euphemism. It looked like the hairdressing deal was dead.

I decided to be honest with him. “Look, Nicklas”, I said, “there isn’t a club in the world that would sign you. No team is so useless that it would want you as their star striker. You have to let this football dream go, Nick, you just have to!”

He sounded upset, but I think he understood. I promised him I’d have another go at finding him a job next week, and I’d make sure it was something he was more suited to. He wished me good luck, and then hung up.

After I put the phone down, I noticed I had ten missed calls from someone called Daniel Levy. I wonder what that was all about…

*For legal reasons, this probably isn’t true.

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