EyeWitness Jude Bellingham’s meteoric rise
“I just want to apologise,” began a 14-year-old Jude Bellingham. “I shouldn’t have missed that penalty.”
The year is 2017, and Birmingham City’s Under-15s have just been beaten at the semi-final stage of a summer tournament in Barcelona, with coach Mike Dodds inviting the players to share any reflections they had of the trip and of their performances on the field.
Bellingham, the team’s star player, wasn’t in the mood to dole out platitudes or pats on the back for having reached the last four. He’d missed a penalty in the final minutes of the game – and it was all he could think about.
“Top players don’t miss penalties at big moments in the game,” he said. “If I want to be a top player, I’ve got to be better than that.”
Less than four years on, Bellingham is unquestionably a top player. With 90 senior club appearances under his belt before his 18th birthday – nearly 50 of which since a £25 million move to
Borussia Dortmund last year – he is one of football’s most accomplished young players. When he came off the bench in England’s Euro 2020 opener against Croatia in June, he became the youngest player in the history of the European Championship (albeit that record was broken again just days later by Poland’s Kacper Kozlowski).
Bellingham’s rise to the summit of the continental game has been frighteningly rapid, an ascent fuelled by self-imposed standards so high as to make a penalty miss in a youth tournament unforgivable, and a football obsession that was sparked in the humble surrounds of the Midlands non-league circuit.
“He was totally different to Jude,” Gary Hackett says of Bellingham’s father, Mark, a sergeant in the West Midlands Police who moonlighted for 20 years as one of the region’s deadliest semi-professional strikers. “He was an out-and-out goalscorer. He was phenomenal. Mark could have played at a much higher level, but because of his job in the police force, he couldn’t mix the football with work.”
Bellingham has spoken of how seeing his father play influenced his own desire to be a footballer. Hackett, a former
Shrewsbury Town, Stoke City and West Bromwich Albion winger, was manager of Stourbridge FC the year Mark Bellingham scored 62 goals in one season. He was also a neighbour of the Bellinghams in Hagley, Worcestershire, and remembers Jude and his younger brother, Jobe, tagging along when their dad would hold coaching sessions at the local park.
“If you ever saw Mark down Hagley Park, doing his coaching, his kids would always follow him around,” Hackett recalls. “They were always playing football, always athletic. You could just sense they were both natural footballers. You always knew that something was going to be really special with Jude. In the area around Hagley and Stourbridge, we’re all very proud of what he is achieving.”
Spotted playing for his local grassroots team, Bellingham joined Birmingham City’s pre-academy programme as an Under-seven. At first, he didn’t stand out as a prospect of particular note.
“I was there at his first session with the football club,” remembers Mike Dodds, who ran Birmingham’s pre-academy at the time and went on to coach Bellingham at every level.
“He loved the game, bounced around like Tigger. But I wouldn’t say he was any better than the other boys. If you’d have said to me back then that this boy would go on to do what he’s done, I’d have said you need your head testing.”
Bellingham’s thirst for improvement and competition was evident from the outset, however. He would regularly be seen out on the pitch long after a session had concluded, practising passing and shooting with his dad and Jobe, who later also joined Birmingham’s academy. He would seek out the club’s coaches for contests to see who could volley the ball against a wall the most times without it touching the floor – invariably he’d win.
Around the age of 11, practice was beginning to make perfect. Bellingham’s development accelerated, taking him clear of his peers.
Mark Muddyman, then a Foundation Phase coach at the club, remembers one game against Bristol City on the academy’s dome-covered 3G pitch in which Bellingham scored nine goals. “He was doing reverse Cruyff turns, nicking it off players and just dancing past three players and scoring at will,” Muddyman says. “That was one of the days we were like, ‘Wow, this boy is special.’”
“The buzz started to grow as he was coming through to the Under-tens and
Under-11s,” adds Karl Hooper, another of Bellingham’s youth coaches. “That’s when the club started to really notice an emerging talent, in terms of his performances in his age group and age groups above.
“I think he relished the pressure of knowing he was good, knowing people wanted to overtake and beat him, and relishing the challenge of trying to be at the top and stay at the top.”
And as his talent flourished, his leadership and sense of personal responsibility grew. In one Under-11s game against Everton, Birmingham found themselves 6-1 down at halftime. Evidently frustrated during the break, Bellingham stirred himself and his team-mates. They rallied to claim a 6-6 draw – Bellingham scored five goals and assisted the other.
The previous summer, Bellingham had been playing for Birmingham’s Under-tens when he was called over to play the final 15 minutes of an Under-11s fixture against local rivals Aston Villa. Birmingham were 3-1 down when he entered the field. A Bellingham hat-trick snatched a 4-3 victory.
His early youth career was spent as a striker, emulating his dad’s scoring feats. But Birmingham’s coaches believed he could offer more from a deeper position. In one conversation with a 12-year-old Bellingham, Dodds asked the pre-teen what role he envisaged for himself.
“I want to be a No.10,” Bellingham replied.
“I think you should be a No.22,” Dodds countered, flummoxing the youngster.
The coach’s idea was that Bellingham should not only transition into a midfield role, but one that would incorporate aspects of the remits of a defensive midfielder (traditionally a No.4 in England), a box-to-box runner (No.8) and a creator in the attacking third (No.10) – hence a No.22.
“If you’d have said to me back then that this boy would go on to do what he’s done, I’d have said you need your head testing” Mike Dodds, Birmingham City head of academy
“He idolised the likes of Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney,” Dodds says. “One of my favourite players was Paul Gascoigne. Gazza could do everything. He could control the ball from deeper areas. He could score. He could create in higher areas. I used to talk to him a lot about Paul Gascoigne. Those three players were the players who we talked about when we reviewed his programme.
“We always reviewed around, ‘Were you a 22 today? Did you defend? Did you run around? Were you a box-to-box eight? Were you a ten?’ He held on to that, hence the reason why now he wears the No.22 shirt.”
As the hype around Bellingham began to grow within youth-football circles, he was selected for the England Under-15s while only 13 years old. On international duty, he’d be surrounded by players from the country’s biggest clubs and traditional youth-development powerhouses – Manchester City, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool. Feeling something of an outsider representing Birmingham City, he felt he had to prove his worthiness to be among the Young Lions. By the Under-16s level, he was team captain, scoring four goals in seven appearances.
Back at Birmingham, the list of scouts attending his Under-15s fixtures swelled to include talent-spotters from some of Europe’s biggest clubs.
In 2017, still only 15 years old, Bellingham and Birmingham’s Under-17s travelled to Rotterdam to take on their Feyenoord counterparts. The Dutch side contained a number of players who’d won the European Under-17 Championship earlier that
year. Bellingham, the youngest player on the pitch, made the game his own. At half-time, coaches Steve Spooner and Hooper retreated to the changing room at Feyenoord’s academy, where they found the door knocking with constant enquiries from attendant scouts and coaches: “Who is that No.10?”
“He was absolutely outstanding against this group of players who’d won the Under-17 Euros in 2018,” Hooper remembers. “He dominated.”
The ease with which he was finding the game two age groups above his own convinced the Birmingham decisionmakers to stretch Bellingham even further, moving him up into the Under-23s. The midfielder still stood out, even scoring on his debut against Nottingham Forest at the City Ground, where he was once again the youngest player on display, a 15-year-old among many team-mates and opponents beyond 20.
“He surprised me with his football brain and the feet that he had,” says former Watford, West Brom and Birmingham defender Paul Robinson, who coached Bellingham in the club’s Under-23s. “He could cope with any situation that came his way. He was a thinker. He’s always thinking about how his game can evolve, what he needs to do better, how he can make his team-mates better.
“His attitude, wanting to be the best, that’s what you saw in him. Some of his moves on the football pitch, players would fall to the floor because of his quick feet and his ability to change direction. He was breathtaking.”
As a boyhood Birmingham City fan, Bellingham had a deep appreciation of the club’s history. He wanted desperately to be a part of it. He is described as a “goal-oriented person”, and he had long targeted Trevor Francis’ record of being the youngest-ever player to play for the club’s first team, at 16 years, 139 days.
“As it started to get closer, it became a real burning desire of his; close to an obsession of wanting to put his mark on the club he supported,” Hooper says. “It was everything.”
Having already trained sporadically with the first team and shone for the Under-23s, Bellingham was beginning to get itchy feet. He was part of the first team’s pre-season tour of Portugal in the summer of 2019, just weeks after his 16th birthday. But he returned frustrated, feeling he hadn’t been given enough playing time and that he was being unfairly held back because of his age. Pounding through the corridors of
the club’s training ground one morning, he sought out Dodds.
“I thought he was going to beat me up!” the coach jokes. “He wanted to get some stuff off his chest. He felt the club weren’t playing him because of his age. He wanted to be judged on his performances and his ability on the pitch, and he was getting frustrated around: ‘They keep using this excuse that I’m just 16.’
“That goes back to his mentality that sets him apart. He went into the first-team environment and he wasn’t happy sitting on the bench. He wanted to play. That was when I knew this boy has got a real chance, the fact that he went in with our first-team players and his mentality was, ‘I shouldn’t be on the bench; I should be starting.’
“I remember us having some really honest conversations, where I’d say: ‘Jude, relax, you’re just 16.’ And he would say: ‘No, I’m not accepting that. If I’m good enough, they should play me.’ That’s the point
I knew this boy is different.”
“My idea was to not use him much in those games,” recalls his manager at the time, Pep Clotet. “But then we played him and I thought: ‘Wow, he can play.’ He was at the physical stage where he could start competing for a role. That feeling of him being ready grew through pre-season.”
Sure enough, Bellingham wouldn’t have to wait much longer. His opportunity – and his record – was right around the corner. With a senior debut in an EFL Cup game against Portsmouth on August 6, 2019, he became Birmingham’s youngest-ever first-team player, at 16 years and 38 days. The early weeks of the 2019-20 season brought a first league appearance, and first league start, a home debut and a first senior goal – making him the club’s youngest-ever scorer.
“I saw in his eyes that he was coming on with a lot of confidence,” says Clotet of Bellingham’s record-breaking goal. “He scored and he won the game for us. In the way he celebrated, I could see he had been waiting 16 years for this.”
“The first-team players were singing his praises with how well he’d done,” adds Robinson. “I think he coped with [Championship football] extremely well and was one of the outstanding players that season at the young age of 17.
“He was head and shoulders above some of the first-team players who’d had long careers – that’s how good he was.”
Bellingham finished his maiden senior campaign with 44 appearances and was named the EFL Young Player of the Year. The maturity and skill of his performances marked him out not only as arguably the Championship’s best player at just 17 but also a transfer target for some of the world’s biggest clubs. Manchester United were chief among his most ardent suitors, but Bellingham consulted with his family and chose what he believed would be the best route for his development.
The decision to move to a new country at such a tender age and in the middle of a pandemic was not taken lightly. But having assessed their stellar track record in developing young players – not least his current international colleague Jadon Sancho – a move to Dortmund made complete sense.
“He explained that Dortmund was his choice,” say Dodds. “I think it kind of sums him up as a boy and his mentality. It was purely, 100 per cent around getting minutes. He said he felt Dortmund was the best club in terms of giving him that opportunity to keep
“He was head and shoulders above some of the first-team players who’d had long careers – that’s how good he was” Paul Robinson, former Birmingham City Under-23s coach
playing. It was never a financial decision.
“Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. The other day was his 88th professional game. When you look at those stats, you can’t argue with his choices.”
Once Bellingham’s departure for Signal Iduna Park was confirmed, Birmingham announced they’d be retiring his shirt number. The decision was roundly mocked, given the youngster had played only one season in the St. Andrew’s first team, but few realised the importance of the number 22 in the development of one of the club’s brightest-ever homegrown talents. Some murmurs have even suggested that the shirt hasn’t been retired, but simply reserved for Jobe’s emergence in the first team – or Jude’s return.
“I always said that I don’t see a roof on Jude Bellingham’s potential because he is very complete,” says Clotet. “Going to a team like Dortmund, I didn’t find it strange. I always thought he was at this level. He told me that he wanted to go abroad because there he could fulfil the things he wanted to do.
“I remember he said, ‘Maybe one day I’ll be back at the club where it started.’”
In Dortmund’s No.22 jersey, Bellingham has already inspired a DFB-Pokal triumph and started Champions League games against Lazio, Sevilla and Manchester City. Only an exceptionally harsh refereeing decision preventing him from scoring at the Etihad, too.
At the end of the 2020-21 campaign, a friend from back home texted Bellingham to congratulate him on an excellent first season in Germany.
A reply was returned instantly: “I’ve got to beat it next season.”