Birmingham City hasn’t always been the most logical destination for our thoughts when we talk about clever decision making in football. But they have had their moments and two in particular look better with every tick and tock towards 2024.
Retiring Jude Bellingham‘s No 22 shirt three-and-a-half years ago felt rather silly at the time. It was a touch premature for a kid of 17 after one senior season, but it doesn’t seem so daft now, right?
Same goes for the brainwave that occurred a short while earlier when they settled on such a random number to go on his back. It’s an old story but one of the best of the genre, taking in the ingenuity of Mike Dodds, their former academy coach, who saw the boy in his care as a No 4, a No 8 and a No 10 rolled into one precocious jewel. He could hold midfield, roam between boxes and create — add them together and you have 22.
I love that tale and no doubt those who follow Birmingham wish such shrewd thinking would revisit their staff. They were miles ahead of the curve on Bellingham, just as they appear to have been some way behind it on the managerial qualities of Wayne Rooney, a man who also knows what it means to be seen as the future.
That can be a suffocating pressure. But Rooney as a player was able to surf it to create a superb body of work — in the final reckoning he wasn’t Cristiano Ronaldo, but who beyond Lionel Messi from recent decades can say they were?
Jude Bellingham has continued his monumental rise throughout the calendar year
With the Euros coming 2024, next year could be a big one for the England and Real Madrid star
To all sensible minds, Rooney is a great of English football’s past. Michael Owen, every bit as impactful as Bellingham and Rooney in his early days, could have got there too but didn’t — his hamstrings and knees wouldn’t permit the longevity of his brilliance and there is a message there about the perils of picking a sure thing. They don’t really exist in sport.
It’s why, as we enter 2024, we might choose to impose some margins on our expectations of Bellingham, because that is what history teaches us.
But where is the fun in that? If no allowances are given for wild springs of optimism, then sport becomes a colossal waste of time. And when is there a better time for wild springs of optimism than the dawn of a new year that features a European Championship?
We are long past the point of seeing Bellingham as an emerging talent. That was the Birmingham narrative and his Borussia Dortmund years were our age of discovery, when we started to read from the same page as Dodds.
But at Real Madrid, in the here and now, he pushes out the horizons of his possibilities with each game. With each goal from midfield. With the passes through tight alleys and those little sidesteps. With his presence of mind and vision. With the way they love him in Madrid after only six months — Gareth Bale won the Champions League five times and never got close.
The least that can be said of Bellingham’s acclimatisation to the big time in 2023 is he rode his new circumstances like Rooney did at Manchester United. The most is that he is the finest player in world football at this moment, a guy who is serenaded with renditions of the Beatles at the Bernabeu and rocks like the Stones in all areas of the pitch, from four to eight to 10. But who truly knows where this will lead in the fullness of a career — an Owen, with all his undertones of regret, or a Steven Gerrard, a Rooney, a Gazza, or something even better?
The joy is in finding out and in the gathering sense that 2024 might well be a year when so much is laid down on paper. It is a year that Real will start top of La Liga, having not dropped a point in the group stage of the Champions League and in which Bellingham will be front running for the Ballon d’Or.
Birmingham City’s decision to retire Bellingham’s No 22 shirt felt rather silly at the time but looks justified since his astronomical success
Bellingham draws many similarities with Wayne Rooney and how he emerged onto the scene
Many of those developments will play out for us in highlights packages and glanced headlines, which is perhaps the single shame of this long-distance relationship. We saw him lace one in from 25 yards against Barcelona because it lapped the world a few million times, but fewer will have watched him put check-spin on one of his through-balls against Napoli as if he was Ronnie O’Sullivan. There is a sadness in that — the director’s cut of Bellingham is every bit as good as the movie.
But the beauty of this summer is it will all be there in vivid detail at the Euros, when we have the fascinating intersection of his story arc with that of Gareth Southgate.
It is Southgate’s pressure and hard-earned accomplishment that he travels to Germany with a squad considered joint-favourites with France. For him, for England, it has that ‘if not now, when?’ feel to it.
I don’t buy into the idea that this collective is any better on a technical level than the ones that went to Euro 2004 or the 2006 World Cup — this is far from an era of great English centre-halves. Nor do I think Southgate will have failed if his tenure ends without a trophy. In fact, that notion seems a little ludicrous and ungrateful.
But equally he must carry the expectations of his own success and the responsibility that comes with holding the best range of attacking options in the competition — will any other team in Germany possess an axis of terror in quite the same form as Harry Kane and Bellingham?
How many other nations there can rely on the positional dexterity of Bellingham to shape different kinds of game situations, either from the kill zone of No 10 or marauding from deeper places next to Declan Rice?
The Madrid forward could have a huge part to play in England’s Euros campaign next year
How many other England managers have a world-class player like Bellingham, who can accept possession in the middle when a match is starting to sting and the stakes are highest?
Through the lens of Bellingham’s progress across the past year, through the number of little conundrums that he solves, it is increasingly possible to think this could, and perhaps should, be the summer that defines Southgate. It might even define a lad of 20, if that doesn’t risk underselling his trajectory.
Of course, all of this could be one of those wild springs of optimism. Indeed, it might be necessary to repeat what Owen said the other day, that Bellingham would need to string five or six campaigns together before he can be judged alongside the likes of Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes. That longevity counts.
But, again, where is the fun in that when you’re looking out over a new year? For now, it doesn’t seem too outlandish to suggest 2024 will belong to Bellingham and the departed soothsayers of Birmingham City.
A few more New Years wishes
If we are to keep to the theme of wishful thinking for 2024, then here are a few more desires with a British tint for the world of sport…
Football: VAR and the Super League can get in the bin. So too the judicial glaciers that leave us questioning if Manchester City are a force to be celebrated, or one bought outside the rules.
Golf: Rory McIlroy to win a fifth major and for those squabbling factions in his sport to get together in a unified tour. The fans who want to see the best play the best are being shafted.
Tennis: Emma Raducanu to stay injury-free and stop firing coaches. Andy Murray to ignore whatever voice in his head that tells him it’s the end.
Rugby union: Whatever efforts have been made around brain injuries, quadruple them.
VAR has continued to cause controversy in the Premier League throughout the season
It would be great to see Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy win a fifth major in 2024
Boxing: Tyson Fury versus Oleksandr Usyk, a functioning approach to doping and accountability around Daniel Kinahan’s involvement in the sport.
Cricket: Less can be more. If matches go the distance, England could play on 85 days out of the next 366 in Tests alone. Novelty should count for something in international sport.
FORMULA ONE: A competitive season between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.
Athletics: Keely Hodgkinson and Katarina Johnson-Thompson to win gold at the Paris Olympics.
Finally, a happy new year to all readers.
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