When England host Australia on Friday, they will do so with, perhaps, the world's most impressive rising star in their midst. Jude Bellingham has taken the world by storm at Real Madrid with ten goals in all competitions already. The twenty-year-old midfielder has put Los Blancos on his back and carried them through the stretches where fellow superstar Vinicius Junior has been absent due to injury. Bellingham joins an already strong squad in England, though one that has fallen short at the biggest international tournaments, exiting in the quarterfinals, of last year's World Cup after finishing second at the previous Euros and third at the World Cup before that.
There's nothing like fully integrating a burgeoning superstar in the mix to suggest that perhaps now will be the era when England can finally get over the hump. This international break then, first against Australia, and then against Italy in Euro qualifying offers an opportunity to see if Bellingham's growth is reflected in the international context.
Here's everything you need to know about the match, and about Bellingham's meteoric rise.
How to watch
- Date: Friday, Oct. 13 | Time: 2:45 p.m. ET
- Location: Wembley Stadium -- London
- TV: Fox Soccer Plus
- Live stream: Fubo (try for free)
How should England use Bellingham?
Is Jude Bellingham the ball carrying, hard tackling dynamo of his early years at Borussia Dortmund? Is he the deeper-lying facilitator that so shone for England at the World Cup? Or perhaps the real Bellingham is the one we have seen in Real Madrid colors, a center forward in midfield clothes, delivering an early output in front of goal that rivals some of the best the Santiago Bernabeu has ever seen.
He is, of course, a man for all positions, the No. 22 because his youth coach convinced him he could be a No.4, a No.8 and a No.10 in one. Whether you are Carlo Ancelotti or Gareth Southgate, Bellingham is whatever you need him to be.
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When Bellingham arrived in the Spanish capital this summer, he found a club that did not desperately need another tempo setter, ball progressor or chance creator of the sort that their $110 million man had often been in a Dortmund shirt. With Karim Benzema gone and Vinicius Junior injured, Madrid needed someone to put the ball in the net. That they have got in emphatic fashion.
Through 10 games Bellingham has 10 goals and three assists in all competitions, his brace against Osasuna last week meaning he is on the same scoring pace that Cristiano Ronaldo set when he arrived in La Liga. It is not that Bellingham did not take shots or score goals at his previous club. Indeed, last season his 42 appearances across all competitions delivered 14 goals and seven assists. This year, however, the 20-year-old who plays like he's a decade older has dramatically changed his shot profile.
A near 25 percent increase in his shots per 90 minutes of league play is notable but what is immediately apparent is how much more he has been getting into the box, going from 4.1 to 5.6 touches in the area and adding nearly an extra shot per 90 from the most dangerous area of the pitch. His average of 2.39 penalty box shots per 90 is 35th among players with 500 or more minutes in Europe's top five leagues, a frequency of shots comparable with the likes of Heung-min Son and Mohamed Salah. No wonder his xG has skyrocketed from 0.27 to 0.53.
There is enough of a hot streak in Bellingham's numbers -- his eight La Liga goals come from little more than four expected goals -- to suggest that staying the course with Madrid's all-time record scorer might be beyond him. However he is going to get an awful lot more goals if he continues his habit of smart late runs into the penalty area.
Take his sensational opener against Osasuna, the sort of goal veterans deliver after years of learning the movements of their teammates. As Luka Modric has the ball in the right channel, Dani Carvajal makes a run to attack the space between the left back and center back.
Bellingham's first instinct is to look for the short pass inside but he quickly reads that the ball is going to find Carvajal in the box. From there, he is on hand to pick up the knock back from his right back before stroking a shot into the net.
Bellingham in the final third is constantly in motion, always attacking spaces. When Ancelotti speaks of his veteran mentality it is reflected in an instinctive sense of where the second ball might drop. It is a nightmare for defenders.
"He's finding a lot of opportunities in attack and the fact that he doesn't have a fixed position on the pitch, he does a lot of damage to opponents and nobody expected this level in terms of goals," said Ancelotti. "It's easier to study and analyse a player who has his position fixed and he doesn't, so the truth is that it's very difficult to defend him well."
It gets better. Bellingham's upswing in scoring output has not brought with it some great drop off elsewhere. There are aspects to his game that are less pronounced -- fewer progressive carries, a downswing in interceptions and ball recoveries -- but he is making as many passes, winning the same proportion of duels. For now, he is the free scorer from midfield, the last man to make the overloads. If Madrid need him to be something different in the next month, year or decade, there is little to suggest they can't do it.
What do England need from him then? At the World Cup Southgate largely deployed his bright young thing deeper, fewer touches in the box, more defensive work assigned to him. Instinctively that feels like a misallocation of resources, a Picasso gathering dust in the attic. It need not be though. Most world class talents demand you build the team around them. Bellingham is proving he is adaptable enough to fit into so many roles that it perhaps makes more sense to get your other top talent in their best positions and trust that your best midfielder can excel at whatever is left.
Certainly Bellingham can take up the sort of advanced positions he did when he delivered his wonder goal against Scotland. Equally, if Phil Foden continues to excel in the more central role he has taken up for Manchester City, this season a Bellingham-Declan Rice double pivot would tick every conceivable box around ball recovery, retention and progression. The Madrid man's own versatility offers Southgate avenues to incorporate the more esoteric talents of Trent Alexander-Arnold in central midfield.
More even than his adaptability, perhaps what Bellingham offers to Southgate is a sense of new beginnings. It should be curious indeed that an England team who have reached the last eight of their last three major tournaments seem to have lost their bond with supporters. The bitter dividing lines of club football have been readily transposed onto the Three Lions. There are valid questions to ask about Southgate's seemingly infinite well of trust in Harry Maguire, no matter how well he tends to perform in an England shirt. Would those questions be asked with the same vitriol and glee if he were not the club captain of Manchester United, the team everyone loves to hate?
Liverpool fans bemoan Southgate's inability to exploit Alexander-Arnold, a talent sufficiently inscrutable that Jurgen Klopp has restructured his entire side on more than one occasion to fiddle with the positioning of his right back. That is not all that easily done over a dozen or so training sessions in three months. When Arsenal fans aren't bemoaning the limited game time of Ben White and Aaron Ramsdale, they're bemoaning the excessive game time of Bukayo Saka.
Bellingham slices through the discourse. His successes in the white of Madrid (and perhaps England next summer) belong to the nation as a whole. A Liverpool supporter can contend that Bellingham is the best young midfielder in the world and their Manchester United counterpart might just agree. They'd both be right.
