How do you become the leading, most influential, most charismatic player on a team like Real Madrid; before you’ve turned 20; having played just a handful of games in your debut season for the club? Ask Jude Bellingham.
He’s had 15 goals and four assists in his first 16 matches for Real Madrid, and is the only player in the club’s history to have scored in his first four matches on the trot. Those are just the numbers. Consider the influence: the way he commands the Madrid midfield, links play, picks out just the right pass for just the right person; finds those shadow positions where he can put the slip on his marker, extend a toe, and score.
Bellingham won the Golden Boy Award this month, conferred by journalists in Europe to the most promising young player under 21 on the continent.
Bellingham turned 20 in June, and he’s certainly earned it. Before the start of the season, Madrid were a team in transition. Their most influential midfielders were either moving (Casemiro) or becoming less effective with age (Luka Modric). Their most prolific assist-maker and second-highest goal-scorer, Karim Benzema, had left for the Saudi Pro League. What Madrid were looking for was a miracle-maker in their attacking play; what they found was the second coming of Zinedine Zidane.
On a more serious note, perhaps the most startling thing about Bellingham is just how much his style of play resembles Zidane’s: those magic touches, the quick turn and acceleration into the box, the little flicks that turn into glorious defence-splitting passes.
The young Englishman from Birmingham started out a prodigy. He was selected for Birmingham City’s academy at seven, made his senior debut in an English second-tier game at 16 (the youngest ever for Birmingham). The following year, he had been scouted and drafted by the best youth development club around today, Bundesliga’s Borussia Dortmund.
He had a brilliant debut season, and became one of only two players in Champions League history to have played more than 10 games in the league before turning 18 (the other is Kylian Mbappe).
Bellingham did all this as an athletic, box-to-box midfielder, most adept at breaking up the opposition’s play. In the 2022-23 season, before he joined Madrid, he was winning more challenges than any other player in the Bundesliga.
Then Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti made a genius move: he shifted Bellingham from the most in-demand position in the football market right now, to a more free-floating central attacking position.
This made all the difference, as Bellingham, already a remarkable player, found another level to his game. “All the credit has to go to Mr Ancelotti, who found the right position for me,” he said in a recent interview.
Finding the right position for a generational player can make all the difference. Think back to 1999, when then Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger bought a struggling young winger called Thierry Henry over from Juventus and gave him the striker’s role, creating arguably the greatest forward the Premier League has seen. Or when Alex Ferguson moved Cristiano Ronaldo from winger to a more central position at Manchester United, and created the most prolific goal-scorer in football history.
Sometimes, all it takes for talent to flower: a slight shift in perspective.
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