The deception begins before he has even received the ball. As Ezri Konsa steps forward, Jude Bellingham leans towards his marker, Ylber Ramadani, and intimates he wants the pass in behind. Ramadani steps across to cover. On this, Bellingham immediately switches direction and takes two quick paces towards Konsa. The pass comes, as it was always going to do. But Bellingham’s sleight has earned him five precious yards of space.
The striker Myrto Uzuni now drops in to close him down. Myrto, meet Jude. Pull up a chair. You’ve played against him before at Granada, you’re familiar with his work, and you want to help, you really do. You try to get around his body to where the ball is, only to find that body and ball have mysteriously vanished: a quick swivel and then off in the other direction, beyond your despairing grab, in the general direction of your penalty area. Four seconds later, England will score.
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This is the most interesting part of Bellingham as a footballer: how little ornamentation there is in his ostentation. No fancy stepovers here, no showboating: just simple skills performed to concerto level, every solution condensed to its most economical, most devastating form. The chop, the feint, the swivel, the subtle leans and shifts of weight. A kid can learn to do any of these in an afternoon.
Even the pass he plays to assist Myles Lewis-Skelly’s goal is a simple 15-yard side-footer you or I could nail. But the speed and vision to see it in the first place, the audacity to risk it, the timing and pace and roll of the ball. Plus everything that went before. None of these elements is outrageous or outlandish in its own right. What makes Bellingham a true great is being able to put these pieces together, perform them perfectly, one after the other, again and again.
Anyway, as England get their World Cup qualifying campaign under way, the point is this: we can grumble and grouse about fringe squad members, engage in protracted arguments about who the backup left centre-back should be, but all of this is window-dressing. England’s ability to win the World Cup hangs on one question, and one follow-up: what kind of Jude Bellingham turns up in North America next summer? And how far is Thomas Tuchel willing to facilitate him?
We should probably be clear on what this means in practice. What it does not mean is simply letting Bellingham run where he wants and do what he wants, whenever he wants. The worst way of using Bellingham is to sacrifice the plan on the altar of his talent. The second-worst is to sacrifice his talent on the altar of a plan, to take what he does for granted, assume it can simply be recreated in the aggregate.
At tournament level, the greatest players do need a certain degree of autonomy, an element of give and take, an agreed level of freedom within a broadly defined role. In a format where the margins are razor-fine and games often decided by a single moment of brilliance – say, an outrageous bicycle-kick in the final minute of a losing knockout fixture – any winning culture needs to nurture invention and initiative, the licence to try things.
On some level, Tuchel already seems to be getting this. He described Bellingham as “extraordinary” when his Bayern Munich side came up against Real Madrid in the Champions League last year, praising his ability to play without “the weight of the shirt”. And in his entreaties to Marcus Rashford and Phil Foden, urging them to run at defenders more rather than stepping inside, you can spot a subtle shift in emphasis. If the shot’s on, the shot’s on. But this is an attack built around Bellingham and Harry Kane and your primary job is to make sure they get some space.
But the hinge here is emotional rather than tactical. What seems to set Bellingham apart from his peers is that brashness, that swaggering streak, that Big Jude Energy. In this respect Madrid are the perfect club for him: the place where vaulting ambition meets vaulting arrogance.
“We know there’s a certain way of winning games,” Bellingham said after the recent Champions League triumph over Atlético. “We understand game situations really well.”
This stuff sounds quite useful, on balance. England could really do with some of it. Yet for all his gifts Bellingham finds himself strangely unloved in his home country, met with a certain demureness verging on disdain. You hear he has few close friends in the squad. You hear mischievous whispers, transcribed by credulous journalists, that he is egotistical, selfish, a drain on the side.
Perhaps this is simply Bellingham’s due for deviating so visibly from what the New Statesman so memorably described last summer as “our prefect fetish, our Matthew Pinsent ideal”. England likes nice quiet boys. But then England has no shortage of nice quiet boys. Surely there is also some room in there for a little creative tension, a little snarl, a little bluster.
In this respect, he will need Tuchel to have his back when the inevitable media and public backlash drops. There will be flare-ups, shows of emotion, silly yellow cards, an emotional temperature that needs to be carefully channelled. But this is the price of doing business with genius. Bellingham will always need something to kick against. Tuchel’s job is to make sure it’s not the whole world.
Even Real Madrid are still working out how best to harness a player who can do pretty much everything on a football pitch. He started this season slowly, looking grouchy and worn down. Then there was a sparkling spell of seven goals in eight around the turn of the year. Now he has not scored a league goal since January. At the same, the arrival of Kylian Mbappé has unleashed Jude the creator, with more assists per 90 minutes than any season in his career.
Jude will antagonise. Jude will frustrate. Jude will scandalise the perfume-hankied sensibilities of middle England. But Jude will also break a defence open, win you a game, assist in a Champions League final, assist in a Euros final, draw you and your public a little closer. Go with it. Lean into the madness a little. Because Jude may just win you a World Cup.
