Word had got round that a 16-year-old was about to make his senior debut for Birmingham City and break Trevor Francis’s record as the club’s youngest ever player that had stood for 49 years.
It was 6 August 2019, and scouts and recruiters packed the seats at Portsmouth’s Fratton Park stadium for what was otherwise a run-of-the-mill League Cup fixture.
Most teams in the Premier League had been tracking Jude Bellingham through Birmingham’s youth teams for years — every time he played for the youth teams, already several years above his age group, at least half a dozen scouts turned up, usually more.
“He was one of those names everybody talked about right through the game,” says Chris Robinson, at the time a youth recruiter for Chelsea who was there to witness Bellingham’s debut. “Everyone was looking at him and knew of his abilities. All the big clubs were tracking him.”
Still, this was a significant moment. Bellingham had long been training with the first team — from age 15 — and was known for routinely astounding with his tricks and ability. But many young players have followed Bellingham’s path only for careers to dwindle away. How would he cope playing against men in front of an unforgiving Fratton Park crowd?
Birmingham were soundly beaten in the game, but Bellingham made a solid start, threw himself into tackles, at one stage earning a yellow card for snapping Ellis Harrison, the Portsmouth striker, with an unmalicious but overzealous tackle.
“From the start he looked very assured,” Robinson recalls. “He was confident. He worked hard, he got around well — a really good mover. He wasn’t quite the frame that he has now, he wasn’t that imposing figure, he was slim and athletic.”
With nine minutes remaining, the midfielder was replaced by Caolan Boyd-Munce and as he left the field he was hugged by the manager, Pep Clotet, who whispered in his ear to show appreciation to the 1,500 travelling fans who had made the 300-mile round trip not realising they were witnessing a moment in history. Bellingham applauded them.
Robinson looked down the line of seats adjacent to him and everyone had left. To this day he is unsure if it was to beat the traffic, or if they had all simply come to see Bellingham.
Bellingham’s ascent from that day has astonished almost everyone. From Stourbridge to Real Madrid. From the toddler who grew up in the Midlands disinterested in football to the player many believe could win England the European Championship this summer, even though he does not turn 21 until the knockout stages begin in Germany.
He is the Galactico — joining the roster of star-studded names, including Zinedine Zidane and Cristiano Ronaldo, to play for one of the world’s greatest clubs — who has never played in the Premier League.
This has been an intentional career move. And, not to take anything away from Bellingham’s ability, his family have been a crucial, stable, steadying arm around the shoulders in his career. Dad, Mark, became agent; mum, Denise, who he refers to as “Queen”, moved with him to Germany when he signed for Borussia Dortmund, becoming the most expensive 17-year-old in history.
From Birmingham to Dortmund to Madrid, the family have not misplaced a pass when it comes to managing their son’s development.
‘A young, blossoming player’
Whenever a new global sporting megastar emerges in the world we soon learn of the child prodigy who preceded them. Tiger Woods imitating his dad’s golf swing at six months old and appearing in Golf Digest by age five. Venus Williams showing aptitude for tennis aged four, the same age Max Verstappen was winning go-kart races.
There is something refreshing about Bellingham’s early disinterest in football. Until the age of six, if somebody threw a ball to Bellingham he displayed little inclination towards kicking it, and would pick it up and throw it back.
But then, around the time he started watching his dad play for Leamington FC, something clicked. For years Bellingham watched no football on television — apart from the odd episode of Match of the Day — but he grew to love those non-league matches, revelling in his dad, a prolific non-league striker who scored more than 700 goals, scoring regularly.
“Mark was big and strong and a natural goal scorer,” says Richard Beale, who was a team-mate of Mark’s then his coach at Leamington. “He could score all types of goals, from inside the box, outside the box, left-footed.”
Beale recalls seeing Jude and younger brother Jobe, a talented 18-year-old player at Sunderland, in the Championship, attending games regularly, running around the pitch whenever they could, noticing they were talented footballers. Beale would go on to become an important figure in Bellingham’s development as the coach who selected him for Birmingham City’s Under 21s when he was only 15 years old.
Before that, Mark, seeing his son’s interest in the game he loved flourish, first set up a youth team for Jude and his friends to play in, which lasted one season before Bellingham was invited to play for Birmingham.
Coaches recall fondly this seven-year-old turning up in fake kits, including a Barcelona shirt with Messi on the back. Initially on a par with his peers, within a few years Bellingham was progressing at mind-blowing pace.
The first time he was asked to play a year up, with the Under 10s, he was reluctant because he didn’t know any of the players, asking his dad not to make him. He eventually agreed, then scored 15 goals in the first half of a small-sided game and was told he was moving straight to the Under 11s.
Often young footballers play above their age group because they are physically advanced and need the challenge. This was not the case with Bellingham, who was still small, slight, almost fragile.
“He wasn’t a giant, by any stretch of the imagination, at that age,” says Beale. ”He had a lovely frame for a young blossoming football player.”
But he was so fast and skilful, possessed exceptional close control, feet that would blur when he dribbled, a sharp finish. He had this innate ability to receive the ball in tight spots then burst forward, slipping between two, three, four players, spotting and fitting between gaps that should not have existed.
Against far older players Bellingham was hitting 40-year passes with the outside of his boot, nutmegging opponents, chopping around them, scoring with right and left foot, from outside the area and inside it, clever chips, long-range lobs, pressing, hounding, tackling. Coaches remember his comfort dropping back to receive the ball from his goalkeeper aged 11.
While all this was going on his parents still made clear that if his schoolwork slipped he wasn’t allowed to play football — he didn’t have to get the best grades, but he had to make sure homework was done on time, and that he wasn’t late to class. It was never an ultimatum that required testing.
At primary school he was known as a kind child who went out of his way to help others.
As a glimpse into a mindset shared by few others at his age, he tried out for the cricket team one year but didn’t make the cut, so he spent all summer practising with his dad and came back as the best player, helping the team reach a national final.
The speed of his brain
By Under 14 level, Bellingham and his family were invited on a tour of Arsenal’s London Colney training facility. Arsenal believed an offer of half-a-million pounds would be enough to bring him into their youth system, but the family decided to stay at Birmingham, believing there was a clearer pathway.
It proved another shrewd decision. By 15, he was training often with the first team – an extraordinarily rare feat, and starting for the Under 21s — Beale’s team.
“When Jude came into the Under 21s you could see he was way past this level already,” Beale says. “You don’t see a 15-year-old doing things he was doing in first team training sessions: sitting people down with his skills and ability, scoring goals, getting forward, getting back.
“The thing I always noticed with Jude, as soon as he crossed the white line, whether it was a training session or game, he was supremely confident in a really positive way. A natural enthusiasm for the ball. A natural enthusiasm as a competitor. And he stood out a mile from the minute he came into that Under 21 team.”
After training, when teammates were about to return home to families or PlayStations, Bellingham often ate lunch in the canteen in his school uniform before heading to school for lessons. Beale was part of the coaching team who gave him one-to-one sessions to compensate for the time lost to school. “We’d go in on days off to work with him,” he says. “It was a pleasure.”
All the focus was on technique: firing balls at him from different heights and angles that he had to control, back to goal, or from the side, weaving in and out of cones with skill, try to score, sometimes with a second ball flashing in.
In Beale’s Under 21s he was already facing men — young men, in their late teens and early 20s, but also the first-team players allowed to play to recover from injury. Beale particularly remembers one game, away to Fulham, when they were outplayed, the London side having most of the possession.
Up stepped the youngest player in the team. “He’s chopped and turned two players on the edge of the box and curled it in with his left foot. Our team that day shouldn’t have beat Fulham and we beat them because of Jude.
“He was giving a little bit away physically but he more than made up for that in the speed of this brain, the speed of his thought, his decision-making and his technical attributes.”
The debut against Portsmouth soon followed and he quickly became a regular starter, something that concerned some of the older players who felt he was too young to be thrust into first-team football.
Clotet, the manager, called a meeting with them. “From this season onwards, you can tell everyone that you helped Jude Bellingham,” he said, recounting the story to the Coaches Voice. “That you played with him. And you will see that this will mean a lot, because we are seeing the birth of a great player.”
It helped that he was an emotionally mature teenager. Even though he was paid modest wages he had told his dad that he wanted to give something back and support a charity.
Mark was a police officer and worked with the daughter of Rita Fowler, who founded the Mustard Seed charity alongside her late husband, Geoff, which runs a school for 300 children and a feeding program in Kenya.
He was the “sort of 16 year old you’d be really proud to be your own”, Fowler says. “He was very mature. He wasn’t a silly 16 year old. He’s been very supported by people. He’s genuinely just an all-round nice guy, a really lovely lad.”
Bellingham was already sponsored by Adidas and they agreed to let him donate his boots for the charity to sell to raise funds.
“Before Covid I had told the school children that Jude was supporting us but they hadn’t really heard of him,” Fowler says.
“And then when I went out after Covid I wanted a photograph. The kids are football mad in Kenya and just before the World Cup we told them Jude Bellingham was supporting us and they just went bananas. They were so excited. They couldn’t believe it, they had this famous footballer supporting them.”
There’s something endearingly naive about Bellingham, by now at Borussia Dortmund, setting up a GoFund me page to raise money for laptops in which he writes: “I’m an 18-year-old footballer playing for Borussia Dortmund and England and although football is my main passion I also want to use my talent to help others.
“I am currently very keen to support the 300 children at Miche Bora School in a deprived area of Mombasa.”
After an impressive first season, Birmingham had offers from everywhere and it was time to move on. “He could’ve got a move then to any of the major clubs,” Robinson, who now works for Southampton, says. “Everybody was after him.”
Manchester United attempted to impress him by arranging for Sir Alex Ferguson to be there when he visited their training ground in Carrington and offered £20m. Chelsea offered around £20m.
But the family felt avoiding the brutal, harsh glare of the Premier League would be beneficial for their 17-year-old son, so they chose Borussia Dortmund, in the German Bundesliga.
The business side of elite football is not an easy world to step into — navigating sharks and backstabbers, negotiating million-pound contracts, dealing with egos and tempers. But Mark has proved as formidable an opponent to chief executives in boardrooms as his son is to rival players on a football pitch.
Mark was hard-working and driven from a young age, determined to make it as a police officer while playing non-league football. When he moved to the Midlands to join the force there he signed for Cheltenham Town, where Chris Robinson was in charge.
It was the late 90s and Mark was around 19 at the time, and Robinson remembers an “intelligent” young man. “He was someone who you could talk to, who thought about the game. He was very easy to deal with — low maintenance from a manager’s point of view. He worked hard, would do what he was asked to do and understood the game.”
Even after the contract with Borussia Dortmund was negotiated, up until the moment Bellingham signed the family still feared the deal might fall through. The pandemic had taken hold, everyone was wearing face masks, no-one knew what the future held and the German club were paying £20.7m for a player yet to finish his scholarship contract and unproven outside England’s second tier.
But the conditions proved to be the perfect Petri dish for the young footballer, joining a blend of vastly experienced older players, including World Cup winner Mats Hummels and serial winner Marco Reus, and the latest up-and-coming stars, such as Jadon Sancho and Erling Haaland. Together they lifted the German Cup and played in the Champions League.
Bellingham scored on his debut, but took a little time to settle. He took German lessons, determined to embrace the culture, and the psychologist at Dortmund was impressed by the combination of his warmth towards people and his professional focus.
However nice Bellingham is off the pitch, he has a sharpness on it. In one game, a camera picked up Bellingham ranting at team-mate Nico Schulz. ”You can’t get one f—ing pass off, you’re f—ing s—,” he shouted. “Every f—ing time.”
A few weeks later it was reported by broadcaster Sport1 that when veteran Axel Witsel, 15 years Bellingham’s senior, had tried to explain how to press better Bellingham waved him away and things became heated.
Marco Rose, the head coach, was asked about Bellingham’s attitude and said the team needed more of the Englishman’s aggression.
Maybe that fine balance of charm and competitiveness that comes entirely naturally is what has enabled Bellingham to keep growing, to keep rising to each challenge and occasion, to keep climbing the rungs towards greatness with seeming ease.
Again, last season, in his first season at Real Madrid following an £88.5m transfer, nobody could have expected it to go so well. Bellingham won La Liga, the Champions League, finishing as the club’s top scorer and voted the league’s player of the season.
How has it been fewer than five years since that teenager broke through at Birmingham City and broke Trevor Francis’s record? Can anything stop his rise?
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