Before Christmas in 2019, Birmingham boss Pep Clotet called his senior players into a meeting.
After a promising start to their Championship campaign, the West Midlands side were in the middle of a run of just one win in 12 games, crashing to a 3-0 defeat at mid-table Hull. Their play-off aspirations had all but disappeared as Blues slid rapidly down the league table.
For a club stuck in the second tier since 2011, the months ahead looked like being another trudge; another potential battle to avoid relegation. Squad morale was beginning to flag. But this season wouldn’t be forgotten as the others were, and Clotet knew it.
“I told the players, ‘Just remember one thing’,” the Catalan coach tells FourFourTwo now. “I said, ‘If we stay in the league and what I have in my mind comes true, this is going to be one season that you’ll remember for the rest of your lives. You will be able to tell your grandkids that you played with Jude Bellingham in his first season. You don’t see the meaning of this now, but one day you will understand it’.”
At that moment, Bellingham was 16 years of age and had made only a handful of first-team appearances. Already, though, it was clear he was destined for the very top.
THE STOURBRIDGE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE
A boyhood Blues fan, Bellingham had been inspired from the start by his dad, Mark, a police officer and – more to the point – a prolific non-league striker with Halesowen, Sutton Coldfield and more. Jude and brother Jobe, two years his junior, would hone their skills on a patch of grass outside their home in the village of Hagley, near Stourbridge, on the south-western outskirts of Birmingham.
“We’d be out there from morning until night, especially in the summer, when we didn’t have school,” Jude later revealed. “It would always end with us as best mates or the worst enemies ever; the amount of times we came in with tears streaming down our faces are countless! Every game we played, we said it was the Champions League final.”
Birmingham snapped up Bellingham at just seven years old. “We got a call from a friend of my dad at the club, who said, ‘He’s doing OK – you might as well bring him along to see if he’s any good’,” recalled Jude, self-deprecatingly. “I went, and they saw something in me that they could develop.”
And develop he did, guided by the club and his family, who drove home the importance of attitude. “The message from my parents,” he said, “was: ‘If you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it 100 per cent’. Whenever I had a strop on, my dad would remind
