To Barcelona, Jude Bellingham goes? How Real Madrid’s new star was prevented from moving to Camp Nou by difficulties surrounding their loanee wonderkid, Aston Villa.
In May 2023, pictures of an old scrapbook emerged. In the pages, printed in 2009, a young Jude Bellingham described his dream job: “A professional footballer for Barcelona and England.”
Those comments, expressed by a child who had not yet reached his teens, were soon used as ammunition by Barcelona fans to declare, definitively, that Bellingham would sign for the Blaugrana that summer. They weren’t the only fanbase to make lofty assumptions with little evidence, but their claim, based on the scribblings of a child, was among the more far-fetched.
Of course, things turned out differently. Bellingham signed for Real Madrid, and has quickly established himself as one of the best players in not just La Liga, but Europe. On Saturday, he will face off against Barca in his first taste of El Clasico, taking the field at the Olympic Stadium for Los Blancos in what could already prove to be a pivotal clash in the title race. It is the perfect contest for a rising star to show himself as being one of the world’s best.
But those Barca fans who clung to old scrapbooks, it has since turned out, came closer than they might have thought to having their wishes come true. Although a host of clubs chased after Bellingham throughout his teens — Manchester City and Liverpool were also keen suitors — the Blaugrana had a real chance of landing him from Birmingham City before anyone outside of England’s second city knew his name.
In 2019, in fact, Barca secured a meeting with Bellingham’s father, Mark, only for him not to show up. The reasons why were only recently made public…
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Barcelona
Why did Barca fail?
This all starts with a different English teenager: Louie Barry. A Birmingham boy like Bellingham, Barry had impressed over a 10-year spell at the West Brom academy, and, before even making a first-team appearance, had fielded interest from Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona.
Barry eventually chose Barca, and became the first English player to ever walk through the doors of the famed La Masia academy. However, things didn’t go to plan from the outset, and as a close friend of Bellingham’s from their time in the England youth set-up, word of his struggles soon got back to the Midlands.
Just five months after the Barry penned his Barca contract, the Catalan club were due a meeting with Mark Bellingham in London. It did not go to plan.
“He didn’t show up to the meeting,” Bojan Krkic Sr., father of the former Barcelona attacker and a club scout for over a decade, told Cadena SER in 2022. “I know he did it to a lot of people. His excuse with us was that we had already signed an Englishman his age [Barry] from Aston Villa or West Bromwich, and he jokingly said: ‘My son will not sign for Barca because he cannot play with someone of that limited quality’.”
Bellingham did go on to leave Birmingham in the summer of 2020, joining Borussia Dortmund that July.
