Imagine the embarrassment. You spend four years spreading the word of a messiah: a polite, prodigious, starchild-cum-saviour, destined to bring us into the light. And then, days before his 21st birthday, he reveals himself to be someone quite different. A stroppy, superior, bumptious little brat who scores one of the best goals in his country’s history and then runs to scream “who else!?” at a small nation whose sporting dreams he has just crushed.
This is the arc of Jude Bellingham. The rapid reveal of his fiery character, and our new understanding of what he actually does on the pitch, has been a difficult one for some parts of the media to stomach. On TalkSport, the ex-Premier League manager René Meulensteen called his celebration against Slovakia “arrogant”, while social media is loaded with jokes about him shouting “vamos” more times than playing a forward pass. Last year, stories leaked that his ex-Borussia Dortmund teammates were unhappy with his attitude around the dressing room, while Gareth Southgate has had to address some of his tempestuous handbags and histrionics in the Euros.
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