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.”