England deserve a tide of goodwill, yet somehow Jude Bellingham is still a target | Jonathan Liew

Sir Alex Ferguson was there. Bryan Robson was there. Eric Cantona was there. The manager Ole Gunnar Solskjær was there, and yet even as these four club legends sold the dream of Manchester United to a 17-year-old from the Midlands, they could sense the elusiveness, the coldness, the drop of the shoulder. The nagging suspicion that, like so many defenders Jude Bellingham would later encounter, they too were grasping at pure air. “He had it planned out,” Solskjær would later remember. “He knew what he wanted. X amount of minutes in the first team. The most mature 17‑year‑old I’ve ever met in my life.” Though five years have passed since Bellingham turned down United for Borussia Dortmund, for me this is still the story that explains him best of all. The origin myth. This is what you all think I’m going to do. So I’m going to step that way instead. Related: Ian Wright believes Jude Bellingham’s critics not ready for a ‘black superstar’ And before we talk about Problem Jude, Petulant Jude, Selfish Jude, One Man World Cup Wrecking Ball Jude, let’s first discuss Jude the way he deserves to be discussed. Jude, the artist. Jude, the apostate. Jude, the obsessive student of the game who quotes Theodore Roosevelt after a big tournament win. The Jude who scores one of the most memorable goals in England history at Euro 2024, who has played five La Liga clásicos and scored the winning goal in three. Yet to listen to some of the chat about Bellingham in recent weeks is somehow to be persuaded that all this is somehow incidental, bordering irrelevant. “Of course he’s a fantastic player, no doubt about that,” pundits and journalists will opine, as if this is actually the boring bit, the part where the operator reminds you that all calls are being recorded, the necessary disclaimer before we get to the juicy stuff. Yes, yes, he’s very good at football. Now can we please – please – talk about his attitude. Sport, at its most basic level, is the pursuit of outcomes. You score or you don’t; you win or you don’t; you lift the trophy or someone else does. Certainly Bellingham seems to be a player who has plotted his career in a largely transactional fashion. Dortmund equals minutes. Madrid equals silverware. United equals what? The accumulated generational angst of the world’s most dysfunctional big club and a selfie with a 78-year-old? Yeah, if you could maybe just put that in an email, cheers. Perhaps this was what Ian Wright meant on The Overlap last week when he observed that certain parts of the media “hate that they can’t get to him”. And yes, Wright is very much a self-knowing brand these days, a man paid to deliver snackable content, but he also has a brilliant nose for this stuff. He, too, has experienced the way the media environment tries to bend and shape its star footballers, exalts them for being a Black man with a personality, then ridicules them for being a Black man with a personality. What Wright expressed so succinctly was the way Bellingham’s otherness has made him such a ripe target. Take the fact that Bellingham has never played in the Premier League. Even in an age when his every game is available to watch, few do. There is a still a kind of freshness to him, a player unsullied by 24-hour tribal club discourse, who only really gets talked about during international weeks. Did you even notice he scored a late equaliser against Elche at the weekend? On some level, there is a part of the English footballing establishment that has never really forgiven him for this. For spurning the haptic pleasures of Our League, for refusing to worship at the altar of the Barclays, an English player who has never shared the foundational belief that England is the centre of the footballing universe. Perhaps this is why there is such glee in some sections of the media when Thomas Tuchel – who by contrast can’t stop talking about how much he loves England – gives him a little punishment beating every now and again. Then you have his approach to the media, which – as one might expect from a player whose family was relentlessly hounded during the last European Championship – verges on outright hostility. Then, by no accident, you have the slow drip of camp gossip, the rumours and whispers that get circulated about Bellingham being a bad teammate. Nobody ever seems to be able to explain why. Weirdly, nobody ever seems willing to put their name to any of the criticism. So you have all that. This, in itself, would be enough to cast him as The Other. Then you have the colour of his skin. Which of course does not remotely trigger most people, but will definitely trigger some people, and some of those people buy newspapers, and some of those people may even run newspapers. And so, by the simple law of the market, there will inevitably be a small swirl of media opinion catering to this section of the audience. Nor does any of this ever have to be overt. The tropes and the unspoken language of anti-Black sentiment are everywhere you look: in the numbers of Black coaches in this country, in the subtly discriminatory language of “leadership qualities”, in a political landscape where it has become increasingly permissible to conflate Englishness with whiteness. None of this makes the treatment of Black players inevitable. But, somehow, it makes the dots a little easier to connect. Does any of this exempt Bellingham from criticism? Of course not. If he plays badly, he plays badly. But when so much of the recent commentary has taken a sinister turn into more intangible issues of behaviour and attitude, it is perhaps time to give pause. Maybe Bellingham grates on you for whatever reason. But have you submitted every single other England player to the same character test? If, say, a folk hero such as Dan Burn scored the winning goal in a World Cup knockout game and shouted “who else?” down the camera, would you like him more or less as a result? There’s a reason it’s called unconscious bias. This is of course why unconscious racism is so insidious and dangerous: it can always be disguised as something else. You didn’t like Meghan Markle because of her scheming. You didn’t like Diane Abbott because of her maths. Many newspapers used a picture of Bukayo Saka (64th-minute substitute) to illustrate a defeat by Iceland simply because he’s a familiar face that everyone will recognise. The real sadness here is that this is a genuinely exciting England team that deserve to go to North America on a tide of goodwill and optimism. Eight wins, no goals conceded, 22 goals from 11 goalscorers, an established system and plenty of healthy competition for places. We have Bellingham, Morgan Rogers, Cole Palmer and Phil Foden competing for one spot. This is basically the stuff of dreams. Is there any real need for resentment or rancour? But these buttons must somehow still be pushed, just in case we lose. Perhaps in a sense the Bellingham coverage has already served its purpose: to set up scapegoats for defeat, to stir the pot and create a fresh stream of talking points and sacrificial cows. It was Marcus Rashford and it was Jess Carter, and it was Raheem Sterling and it was John Barnes before them. As a wise man once said: who else. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? 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