After becoming a member of his boyhood membership as a seven-year-old, Bellingham progressed quickly via Birmingham Metropolis’s academy to make his first-team debut aged simply 16 years and 38 days, turning into their youngest-ever participant.
He performed one full season for Birmingham, making 41 appearances within the Championship and scoring 4 targets, earlier than signing for Borussia Dortmund for £25m in the summertime of 2020.
When he left, Birmingham retired the quantity 22 shirt {the teenager} had worn following his breakthrough. It was a quantity he’d put on once more in Germany and one which had specific relevance to the midfielder’s improvement.
As Bellingham labored with the youth coaches inside Birmingham’s academy, they wished his sport to include components of a defensive midfielder (historically a quantity 4 in English soccer), a box-to-box quantity eight and a artistic quantity 10. Add all three collectively, you get quantity 22.
This nurtured a versatility that served Bellingham nicely upon his senior breakthrough at St Andrew’s.
“When he went to the primary staff at Birmingham, he performed extensive,” former Birmingham left-back Paul Robinson, who coached the younger Bellingham on the membership, tells BBC Sport.
“He performed extensive proper, he performed extensive left. For his improvement, he had the makings of taking part in in numerous positions larger up the pitch. Jude was at all times able to doing that due to his mind.”
Most frequently, although, the Stourbridge-born star performed as a deep central midfielder, dictating play in the midst of the pitch. His mixed common of 4.01 tackles and interceptions per 90 minutes that season stays a profession excessive.
“When he was 15, 16, his place was the quantity six, with the ability to get on the ball and dictate video games along with his high quality of passing,” provides Robinson. “I’ve by no means seen somebody so younger be so clever when it comes to understanding the sport.”
Bellingham additionally labored on points of his sport that, 4 years later, are bearing fruit now at Actual Madrid.
“You can see the chops that he does now, the place he goes proper foot-left foot and comes again on himself,” says Robinson. “He nonetheless does that. That is what he is comfy with and he is aware of it really works.
“The largest factor that I picked on with Jude was that he could not actually head the ball. So we labored on it with crosses and labored on his timing, stepping into the field and getting headers. And once you see him now with what he is doing, he is on autopilot – he is aware of what he must do and he simply does it.”
