Jude Bellingham: You love him, I love him, everyone loves him. Other than that one time when Gio Reyna said that he wouldn't want Bellingham to date his sister, the Borussia Dortmund midfielder has as close to a universally positive approval rating as just about any athlete in the world.
So assumed is Bellingham's current greatness -- and even greater future greatness -- that it has almost obscured what the 19-year-old actually is. He's a midfielder, sure, but what kind of midfielder?
Is he a Kevin De Bruyne-type: a "midfielder" who does all the things that a No. 10 did in the past but just from a slightly different starting position? Is he more along the lines of his idol, Steven Gerrard: a havoc-wrecker whose impressive physical range is best employed with other midfielders who cover all the spaces he leaves behind?
Is he more from the Marco Verratti, Thiago, and Joshua Kimmich mold: a modern midfield cheat code who wins the ball at a world-class rate but also contributes as much as anyone in possession, too? Or can he sit in front of the back four and bring some sudden solidity and strength to a midfield that previously fell apart whenever it lost the ball a la, say, Casemiro?
The promise of Bellingham is that he could be all of the above -- at the same time.
Who is Jude Bellingham?
To start: a teenager.
Bellingham doesn't turn 20 until the end of June -- and he's already on his fourth straight season as a starter for a professional soccer team. He started with Birmingham City, where he played 65% of the league minutes as a 16-year-old. In his first season with Dortmund, at 17, the minutes load dipped down to 56%, but then it rose all the way up to 91% last season and 93% this campaign.
To put into context how rare any of that is: He's played at least 1,697 minutes (his 2020-21 total) in a Big Five European league in each of the past three seasons. This season, just 10 other teenagers across those leagues have played at least 1,200 minutes. Among all of them, Bellingham leads the way with 2,346 minutes. The only other one to break the 2,000-minute mark is Girona's right-back, Arnau Martinez, with 2,028 minutes, while Barcelona's teen duo, Gavi and Alejandro Balde, both should get to the 2,000 mark by the end of the season.
Perhaps the best predictor of future stardom is the number of minutes you play at a young age, and Bellingham has done more of that than just about anyone in recent memory. He's played 9,550 league minutes over the past four seasons -- about 3,000 more minutes than any other current teenager across the Big Five leagues and the English Championship.
Usually, though, teenagers getting lots of minutes aren't quite deserving of those minutes. Rather, they play so much because their club or their coach has decided that the long-term payoff is worth playing the teenage prospect over a currently better veteran player. For example, I'm not sure Gavi would be playing as often as he currently does for Barcelona if he were, say, a 27-year-old with the exact same skill set and physical profile.
That's not the case with Bellingham -- at all.
Let's review what a midfielder is supposed to do. Most broadly: win possession back and then move the ball up field. Bellingham is one of 16 players across Europe's Big Five leagues to average at least five possession-adjusted tackles plus interceptions per 90 minutes, one successful take-on and seven passes completed into the attacking third. The list includes PSG's Verratti, Arsenal's Thomas Partey, Barcelona's Frenkie De Jong, Real Madrid's Aurelien Tchouaméni and Barcelona's Pedri, along with a handful of promising French prospects such as Monaco's Youssouf Fofana, Lorient's Enzo Le Fee, and Lyon's Maxence Caqueret.
But then there's all the other stuff Bellingham does. In addition to winning the ball a ton and helping push it forward, the 19-year-old is also making an impact without the ball. Among that same subset of players, only four of them average at least two touches inside the penalty area: Pedri, Caqueret, Lille's Remy Cabella, and Bayern Munich's Joao Cancelo. The first three are all quite tiny -- none of them win even 50% of their aerial duels -- while the fourth is, well, not a midfielder at all.
So in terms of physically imposing midfielders who win the ball at a healthy clip, carry it forward, pass it forward and make off-ball runs into the penalty area, there's no one like Bellingham anywhere else, at any age.
Coming into this season, if you wanted to pick apart Bellingham's game for some reason, the lack of progressive passing would've been what stood out. You could rely on him to do just about everything other than consistently break lines with his passing. Last season, he ranked in the 61st percentile among Bundesliga midfielders in progressive passes per 90 minutes with 4.65. This year? He's up to 8.67 progressive passes per 90 minutes, which rates in the 98th percentile.
In the Bundesliga, the only player at any position to complete more total progressive passes is Kimmich. Extend it out to the Big Five leagues, and only five other players, including Lionel Messi, Manchester City's Rodri, and Real Madrid's Toni Kroos, have played more.
He's just so good, and he's still getting better.
Is Bellingham really worth it to Liverpool, or Man City, or Real Madrid?
If he wanted to, Bellingham could force Dortmund's hand. If he really wants to go to Liverpool, the club he's been connected with for years and grew up supporting, he could tell Dortmund that's where he's going. They'd have to agree to whatever kind of reduced transfer fee Liverpool could offer, or they could play hardball, tell him they're not selling and keep him at the club. Not only would that risk a kind of public falling-out with their star player -- and risk Dortmund's new place in the food chain, where they function as a finishing school for superstar prospects who could (but don't want to) jump up to a superclub right away -- but they'd also risk losing out on even more transfer revenue as the years fade away on Bellingham's contract, which expires in two years.
We'll see what happens. Liverpool could probably still pay competitive-ish wages in line with their reported competitors Real Madrid and Manchester City, so Bellingham wouldn't lose much money in the process. But we still haven't reached a point where players feel comfortable exerting this kind of power, so the more likely outcome seems like a nine-digit transfer fee and a move to either Man City or Real Madrid.
And now a question I've asked many times before: Can any midfielder be worth it? The list of super-expensive transfers in general is littered with failures, but generally isn't littered with midfielders at all. In terms of true midfielders, the only three among the 30 most expensive transfers of all time are Chelsea's move for Enzo Fernandez in January, Real Madrid's move for Tchouaméni this past summer and Manchester United's signing of Paul Pogba in 2016.
Pogba was a failure for a number of reasons, but mainly because he didn't even play 60% of the available league minutes in his six seasons with Man United. Tchouaméni, meanwhile, has struggled with some injuries and hasn't been able to establish himself as a first-choice starter in Madrid in the second half of the season. But Fernandez might provide the most instructive example of the three.
The 22-year-old from Argentina has truly been fantastic since joining Chelsea. He's leading all Premier League midfielders in progressive passes per 90 minutes with an absurd 10.15 per 90 minutes. And despite a relatively aggressive passing profile, he's still completing 87% of his passes. Fernandez also ranks in the 89th percentile for tackles and the 61st percentile for interceptions. A more granular breakdown of his statistical performance from the consultancy Statsbomb suggested the same: He's damn good.
However, that truth lives uncomfortably with another one: Chelsea are still not a very good soccer team. They spent $100 million-plus on a midfielder, he immediately came in and performed at a world-class level and ... the team didn't really improve. While soccer clubs still bleed out massive inefficiencies on a daily basis, it does seem like they've generally understood the value of midfielders. They just haven't spent as much on these positions as they have on attackers or central defenders because individual midfielders, historically, haven't been able to really affect results in the same way a star attacker or a star defender, who directly add or subtract goals, can.
Michael Imburgio's DAVIES model attempts to take all of those on-ball numbers I've already mentioned and show how they add up to the value a player is providing. Among all midfielders in Europe this season, Bellingham has added the second-most value (5.87 goals above average) after Manchester City's Rodri. However, when you extend it out to all positions, 17 other players rate out ahead of him. That might not seem like much, but the gap between Bellingham and the highest-rated non-PSG player (Harry Kane) is the same size as the gap between Bellingham and the 332nd-ranked player.
What does Bellingham's future really look like?
If there's one other reason to be skeptical of Bellingham's future impact, it's the Bundesliga. The league is significantly different from the other Big Five leagues. Its games have way more possessions and turnovers. There's way more pressure on the ball, and the possession moves up and down the field way more quickly. In other words, there are way more opportunities for a player to just do stuff: make tackles, push the ball up field, and do anything else that shows up in the statistical register.
While Erling Haaland left the Bundesliga and got better, we should still look at him as the exception to the rule. When a player leaves the Bundesliga for another Big Five league, the expectation should still be that his impact diminishes a tiny bit.
Now, that could be canceled out by the fact that Bellingham is likely to continue to get better. He won't be entering his prime until after the next World Cup, and he has already started in a World Cup. Plus, even if a team gets a reduced version of what we've seen in the Bundesliga this season, they're still getting one of the best midfielders in the world.
The fascinating thing about his future is that it can go in so many different directions. At Dortmund, Bellingham is the dude. They're incentivized to just let him roam and do whatever the hell he wants because he's just so clearly the best player on the team. Wherever he goes next, that won't necessarily be the case. He'll have to fit into a tactical system or an established hierarchy of players or a bit of both. Given that he's capable of playing seemingly every midfield role, his development might be shaped by whatever his new team requires from him.
Or he could just continue to do all of it. It's hard to envision a ceiling for a player who already is unlike most other current pros, but when I see the best-case scenario, I see something like a super-charged, injury-proof, gigantic Ilkay Gundogan. The German midfielder is fantastic on the ball, but his movement without it is what frequently allows Manchester City to break down packed-deep, settled defenses with their patient possession. Given the talent around him, Gundogan's runs into the penalty area are almost impossible for opponents to track, so he scores a ton of goals for a midfielder. And if they do track him, then he's suddenly opening up space for Erling Haaland or Kevin De Bruyne or Jack Grealish, right around the goal.
Now, imagine if Gundogan still did all of that, but was also 6-foot-1, could break defenders down off the dribble, was a defensive menace, didn't get injured, never lost balls in the air, and chalked up double-digit goals and assists every season. Oh, and also imagine if you could have this player on your team for an entire decade.
It really wouldn't be fair -- and it would raise even more questions about the Premier League's ongoing investigation of Manchester City's financial malfeasance. But, well, Gundogan's contract is up after the season. Plus, he's 32 years old. Bellingham -- have we said it already? He's only 19.