In 2020 in England they were exclaiming when they discovered that Birmingham City, a historic in the off hours, retired the shirt of a 17-year-old, with just 44 games behind him. Jude Bellingham’s number 22 became part of club and League history. Unintelligible to everyone. But his sale to Borussia Dortmund for 25 million euros rescued the club from its serious financial problems. Birmingham bet that the biggest pearl of their squad in decades would become one of the most important footballers in the world. Yesterday Real Madrid proved them right by closing his signing in exchange for 103 million euros plus 30% in variables, an amount that makes him the third most expensive player in the history of the club after Eden Hazard and Cristiano Ronaldo, and the fourth that has cost more than 100 million, including Gareth Bale.
Angular piece for England at the World Cup in Qatar, the young Bellingham (he will turn 20 on June 29) is a strategic signing for the next decade at Real Madrid. A referential player, with a great presence, but who aspires to give meaning to the football of the white team for a long time. In their intention to provide young talent, Real Madrid has managed to unite Camavinga (30 million), Tchouaméni (80 million) and Bellingham, a center of the field with a lot of projection for the next decade, in three seasons .
The trajectory of this precocious star is surprising. He soon excelled in Birmingham’s lower ranks, where he made his first-team debut aged just 16 to set a new record. Even then he stood out for an inappropriate maturity, which he demonstrated a year later, at just 17, to choose to go to Dortmund instead of Manchester United, who also wanted him. Bellingham chose the German club because “the way they integrate young people into the first team is at another level”, he told The Guardian at the time. He was not wrong in his choice. In a few months he changed the Championship to the Champions League. And the earliness records continued.
His explosion in Germany made him Golden Boy at the end of that season, best player in the world under 21 years of age. Alongside HÃ¥land, he bravely enjoyed the Signal Iduna Park until the Norwegian left for City. Dortmund tried by all means to retain him by making him captain in September and Southgate did not hesitate to give him the helm, aged just 19, of a completely renewed England team for the World Cup in Qatar. France knocked them out in the quarter-finals in a game they didn’t deserve to lose.
Smart on and off the ball, Mike Dodds, his youth coach, told him as a youth that he could play as a 4, 8 or 10. “He reminded me of Paul Gascoigne,” he told The Athletic several years ago. Now he’s a hard-working playmaker with the physicality to run and the ability to partner. A modern midfielder who expresses himself with ease in all attacking positions and even in center half.
He arrives in Madrid to establish himself definitively as a world star. To be the successor of the generation that have led the center of the field, Modric and Kroos. After Hazard (160 million), Cristiano (104.7 million) and Gareht Bale (101), Madrid is blowing the bank with another signing of more than 100 million euros. In fact, his arrival was a public secret for weeks, but the white club has chosen to announce it right after the departure of Karim Benzema, another illustrious white. In the absence of a striker, Bellingham is a millionaire talent to inspire Madridism after a bad year.
