When a 17-year-old Jude Bellingham left Birmingham City to join Borussia Dortmund in July of 2020, Birmingham City released a statement retiring his No. 22 jersey, stating that it was “fitting to retire this number, to remember one of our own and to inspire others”.
Retiring a player’s jersey number is a rarity in football. Retiring the shirt of a teenager with just one season of professional football under his belt is a rarer occurrence. But Jude Victor William Bellingham was not just another teenage prospect.
Born in the market town of Stourbridge, in the West Midlands, Jude Bellingham did not initially take to football. “As soon as you put a football in front of him, [he was] not really interested,” Phil Wooldridge, Bellingham’s first coach, said of him. “It took a while [for him to get into football], it wasn’t just overnight, it was a matter of a few months.”
Wooldridge and Bellingham’s father, Mark, later established a grassroots team called Stourbridge Juniors. Bellingham was a regular for Stourbridge Juniors before he was invited to join Birmingham City’s academy as a seven-year-old. At Birmingham, the youngster began showing signs of his tremendous ability, but his ‘attitude’ was what made him stand out, according to Mike Dodds, who trained him at Birmingham’s academy.