I don’t think that this is particularly widely known or properly understood, but Jude Bellingham was always “scheduled” to be playing in the Champions League quarterfinal second leg at the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday. Only it was supposed to be for Manchester City against Real Madrid instead of Bellingham traveling to England’s north-west with Spain’s champions-elect this week.
It was January last year that I had coffee with an unimpeachable Manchester City source who, when pushed and prompted, admitted that while City might do some ancillary trading during summer 2023, there were only two absolute “must-buy” targets — Joško Gvardiol and Bellingham.
One said yes, Gvardiol, and one said no: Jude the dude. Any club, no matter how behemoth, can be forced to feel the sting of rejection. Top players have a range of options, it’s most definitely a seller’s market — no matter your club history or wealth, it’s quite feasible to miss out on a transfer-market objective.
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But even once you set aside City’s willingness to pay their principal targets stunning salaries, the concept of a young, talented and ambitious Englishman rejecting the offer to work and learn under Pep Guardiola and be likely to win a minimum of two trophies in his first season is pretty extraordinary. By the summer of 2023, Guardiola had been in charge for seven years and had won 14 trophies — an average of two per season.
What transpired, and I feel infinitesimally responsible here, was that Bellingham had already decided, even prior to Guardiola letting him know how important he could be to City, that if there were any possibility of swapping Borussia Dortmund for Madrid then he was, without any question, going to prioritise Los Blancos above any team in the world.
Responsibility? Well, during the period Spanish soccer was becoming the best, most thrilling, most winning, most technically advanced and intriguing football on the planet, I was fortunate enough to work as a part of Sky Sports LaLiga coverage in the UK — a steady 21-year stream of live matches from 1997 onwards, plus what I reckon was a superb weekly magazine show called “Revista De la Liga.”
I recall, during that golden era, regularly telling people (fans, media and plenty in the football industry) that I firmly anticipated this stream of exceptional, well-analysed football flowing into homes all over the UK for 21 years would fundamentally inspire and alter how fans, coaches, players and media thought and talked about the sport we loved. I believed that LaLiga would have a seismic influence. Big ripples in the pond.
The first interview I had with Bellingham this season was just after Madrid beat Union Berlin 1-0 in their Group C match when the Englishman, in his Champions League debut for the 14-times European champions, scored the winner in the 94th minute. It had been dramatic, and a glorious moment for a 20-year-old only a month into his first season at the Bernabéu.
He told me that “since I was a kid” he’d had a TV in his room, on which he’d seen “Madrid innumerable times produce comebacks in situations where you’re saying ‘there’s no way they’ll turn this around!'” The Sky Sports LaLiga effect. That improbably late win over Berlin was, specifically, the very thing he’d been inspired by. That, specifically, was the very thing he’d chosen to sign for Madrid to do.
Bellingham, like Gareth Bale before him, had been wholly seduced by the magic of Real Madrid’s history — the European domination, the battles with Barcelona, the iconic white shirts, the constant array of all-time great footballers who’ve been on Los Blancos‘ books. Seduced by the chance to write his own name in that history. You can easily imagine.
