A week or so before the Champions League final last summer, I went to Real Madrid’s Valdebebas training ground on the outskirts of the city, along with a couple of hundred other journalists, for the club’s pre-match media day.
After an open training session, Madrid put several players up for interview and, to the happy surprise of most of those there, Jude Bellingham soon appeared to take his place at a podium in front of an eager crowd of reporters.
Bellingham was still only 20 then but he was almost as good behind the microphone as he had been on the pitch in his debut season for Real, when he had taken Spanish football by storm with a series of stellar performances and crucial goals.
Bellingham was charming and assured beyond his years. He was witty and smart and self-deprecating and candid and confident and dynamic. He had everyone hanging on his every word. His stint on the dais was a masterclass in the art of communication.
So when I got to Wembley a few hours before the final and saw Jude’s dad, Mark, wandering round the concourse, I thought it might be nice to tell him how impressed I’d been with his elder son and how much I admired him.
I’ve got on well with a few football dads in the past. More my age bracket, after all. Neville Neville was a diamond of a man and I loved the company of Joe Cole’s dad, George, Peter Crouch’s dad, Bruce, and Jamie Carragher’s old fella, Philly.
I had been told Mark could be hostile. I had been told that, to put it mildly, he was not a fan of the written media. He is far from alone in that, of course, but I still thought it was worth a try. I write critical things about players now and again. It’d be nice to redress the balance.
It turned out it wasn’t my best idea. Maybe a few hours before the biggest match of his elder son’s life was not the right time to approach someone with misguided attempts at ingratiation.
I went down to where Bellingham’s dad was sitting and introduced myself. I said my bit about how much I admired his son. ‘Which son?’, he said. This was not, I knew immediately, going to end well.
‘I’ve got two sons, you know,’ Mr Bellingham said, voice dripping with disdain. He had gone from nought to angry in five seconds flat. His younger son, Jobe, who is carving out a fine career of his own at Sunderland, was sitting in front of him.
I apologised and said I had meant his elder son and that it was a stupid mistake. ‘Yeah, it was a stupid mistake,’ Mr Bellingham said. ‘A lot of people make that mistake and it really p****s me off.’
Fair enough. And I should have sloped off at that point, defeated. But, instead, I dug my hole a little bit deeper. I told him my best mate had been taught French by Mr Bellingham’s dad at Southend High School for Boys in the 1980s and that he was one of his favourite teachers. True story.
I know, I know. I should already have put my spade away and sought sanctuary in damage limitation but now it was too late. Mr Bellingham looked away while I was still talking, part-bored, part-contemptuous of this gimp standing next to him.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he said, making it clear this was very much an ex-conversation. My time was up. I wandered back to the press box.
I thought briefly of one of my favourite sports columns, a piece written by the Los Angeles Times’ T.J. Simers after a particularly fractious exchange with the LA Dodgers baseball player, Andruw Jones.
‘Look at your belly, hanging out of your shirt,’ Jones says to him at one point. ‘You’re probably going to die tomorrow.’
‘Not before I write this column,’ Simers says back to him.
I would like to be able to report a similar quality of repartee but I failed that test.
I got chewed up and spat out. It was so bad that it was quite funny and faintly spectacular. I could hear my own teenage son’s voice in my head, saying to me: ‘You just got sent to the burns unit.’
It was something and nothing. My fault for approaching a guy who had zero interest in talking to me. He doesn’t like the press and he sees no need at all to disguise it. I invited it on myself.
There is only one concern, and that surfaced at the end of November when Mr Bellingham’s elder son said, in a press conference before Madrid’s Champions League defeat to Liverpool at Anfield, that he felt he had been made a ‘scapegoat’ for England’s failure to win Euro 2024.
That remark puzzled and worried a lot of people. Bellingham has had another stellar year. He won the Champions League and then he made two standout contributions to England’s journey to the Euros final with stunning goals against Serbia and Slovakia. His second season at Madrid had a slow start but his class has shone through again.
Maybe I was blind to it because I’m such a big fan but I wasn’t aware of anyone in either the written or broadcast media singling out Bellingham for criticism in the summer. The opposite, actually. It’s a love-in. A one-sided love-in, given that Bellingham won’t speak to the English press, but a love-in, nonetheless.
So the idea that he had been made a scapegoat seemed curious. He talked about ‘losing his smile’ because of it. He talked about how he felt the ‘whole world was crumbling down on me’ because of the criticism he believed he had received.
He spoke like a young man whose joy in the game he graces so majestically is curdling already at the age of 21. He spoke like a man who is seeing enemies everywhere when the reality is there are so many people who are captivated by his talent.
If I could single out one football wish for 2025, it is that Bellingham rediscovers the joy of the game when he’s back in the national team shirt. I hope he thrives under the new England manager, Thomas Tuchel.
Perhaps he needs to feel the world is against him to get the best from his talent but I hope that does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hope people continue to value him for the wonder of his ability.
Bellingham is one of the best talents we have produced in the last 25 years. Our stated aim is to win the World Cup in 2026 and if we are even to get close, we will rely heavily on his contribution.
In the 12 months ahead, the hope is that we will see him, Cole Palmer and Trent Alexander-Arnold established as the triumvirate on which England’s challenge in the USA, Mexico and Canada will be built.
So I’ll keep cheering for Mark Bellingham’s older son. And his younger one, for that matter. And in the meantime, I’ll try to resuscitate my powers of polite conversation. My ice-breakers, it seems, need a bit of work.
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