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This week Jude Bellingham offered a glimpse into the mind of a phenomenon by quietly admitting he had envisaged these days, just maybe not so soon. Little did he know, at the start of his teens, that one week training on the outskirts of Barcelona and another at the foothills of the Black Forest would provide him with something of a peek into the future. Birmingham City recognised the boy who joined at seven from Stourbridge Juniors would benefit from fresh challenges, different plains. They wanted to take him out of his ever-evolving comfort zone, though that was somewhere he rarely stayed long.
Birmingham sent Bellingham on a kind of footballing school exchange, to Cornellà and Freiburg, teams in Spain and Germany with whom they had links, to give him a taste of European football. On Saturday Bellingham will play in the continent’s grandest club match, when Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund, his current and former clubs, duel for the Champions League at Wembley. It is a long way from his colourful early days in Birmingham’s pre-academy that Mike Dodds, who coached Bellingham during his first and last training sessions at the club, well remembers.
“He’s going to kill me for telling you these things,” Dodds says. There were the kits Bellingham wore to training — Barcelona, Brazil, Juventus (Zidane on the back) and, of course, Real Madrid — the plain Kipsta football boots and a haircut born in 2002 even though Bellingham came into the world a year later. “He used to have the Ronaldo ‘R9’ haircut, where he shaved his head and had that little tuft of hair at the front,” Dodds says of Bellingham mimicking the Brazilian who also won La Liga in his first season at the club. “You could say it was fate, maybe? He used to turn up in a different kit every training session — you name it, he had it. He bounced around like Tigger.”
Alongside that sense of fun came a self-belief that means Bellingham has always held himself to sky-high standards. Dodds recalls Birmingham’s under-15s losing in the semi-finals of a tournament in the Netherlands, where Bellingham’s words stick in his memory. “It went to penalties and Jude missed his,” says Dodds. “Jude stood up in front of all of the players and apologised, which for a 14-year-old boy I thought was really mature. He said something like: ‘Top players step up in the big moments and I haven’t done that.’”
At that point it was still a case of jumpers for goalposts, blazers v non-blazers during lunchtimes on the playing field at the Priory School in Edgbaston, mixing it with boys four years his senior, the age gap and his wiry frame an irrelevance. Bellingham juggled excelling in his GCSEs with breaking into Birmingham’s first team, arriving and departing training in uniform. “He’d tear us a new one and then wander off to school,” laughs David Stockdale, the goalkeeper who sometimes took Bellingham to training from the then family home near Bromsgrove. Stockdale kept Bellingham guessing, one day picking him up in a “bucket-list car”, the next a transit van. “He used to say: ‘Are you going to put your chauffeur hat on?’ … I’d tell him to get his work clothes on if I turned up in the van. We’d have a good laugh. He’d moan that somebody didn’t give him a free-kick in training. He was cheeky, but he’s never been flamboyant — that’s what gives him his special edge.”
Odin Bailey shared Bellingham’s journey into the first team and visited him in Madrid last weekend, taking in their draw against Real Betis. Bellingham paid for Bailey’s flights and hotel. Bailey, who plays for Stockport, recalls Bellingham’s name being on the lips of the under-14s after a session in which a 10-year-old Bellingham nutmegged him. It was a similar story at first-team training. “Wring you inside out, flick it over your head,” says Harlee Dean, Birmingham’s captain at the time. “We would say to each other: ‘Look what he did to you today.’ Every day he was the best player: you wanted him on your team because he won every day.”
Birmingham accelerated Bellingham’s programme once he reached the under-12s. Until that point, Dodds says, he had effectively been playing with his mates with a smile on his face after formally signing as an under-nine. Dodds has also coached Bellingham’s younger brother, Jobe, at Birmingham and Sunderland, his current club. “Whether it be Jude going to Dortmund and Madrid or Jobe to Sunderland, every decision they made as a family was based on the boys’ happiness.” Bellingham played for the under-16s at 13, for the under-18s at 14 and for the under-23s at 15. Birmingham were mindful of striking the right balance between stress and support. “When he first came up he would try a lot of skills and it wouldn’t always come off but he quickly transitioned into knowing when to do it, when not to do it,” Bailey says. “The transition happened quite quickly, as it has in his first-team career.”
Bellingham and Bailey went to the same secondary school, shone together for the under-23s and made their first-team debuts on the same night at Portsmouth. They joined the first-team’s tour to Portugal in 2019, indulging in the odd prank. “You know when you fill a bucket of water up and tilt it against someone’s door?” Bailey says. “We enjoyed doing it to people much more than we enjoyed it getting done to ourselves … we didn’t do it to any of the first-team boys because they would have got us back 10 times worse.” Before Bellingham left for Dortmund, the pair, plus Geraldo Bajrami, now of Notts County, regularly went for coffees or to Nando’s in Birmingham’s Bullring. “We were kind of like the three amigos,” Bailey says.
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Good cop, bad cop
The flash of the camera, the flicker of the shutter, the sharpening of the focus. Bellingham is in the spotlight, talking in a training top bearing the club crest in front of a backboard of corporate sponsors. “I’d like to be a great player when I’m older and to do so you have to be able to test yourself against the best teams, the best players,” he says, with that infectious warm smile. The questions keep coming, only this is not his unveiling at the Bernabéu, when he stood at the lectern before his family declaring his £88.5m move to Madrid the proudest day of his life but a mock press conference inside a portable building at Birmingham’s Wast Hills training base in Kings Norton.