Brotherhood
In the hours after that most recent, no less excruciating UEFA Champions League final — whose most compelling and yet least surprising narrative tends to pit a tax-paying minnow against a free-spending superpower — someone cobbled together quite the reel. It’s essentially Jude Bellingham through the ages: bidding farewell to his hometown club in Birmingham, to go and do bits for the perennial Xavier Institute that is Borussia Dortmund, then narrowly missing out on a Bundesliga title his final season there; before earning himself a place on the glittering, superstar roster of Real Madrid.
These are the two teams that met in that final in May. To land a metaphor, said reel likens teenage Jude to some villainous tiger, in some anthropomorphic showpiece called Kung-Fu Panda, returning in full pomp to best the red panda that trained him in martial arts. I’ve never seen any of those movies because I’m an asshole that prefers things with method acting; but the idea in that is startling and uncomfortable. Albeit microcosmically, Bellingham’s career illustrates the nature of the modern football economy.
The path has been nearly perfect: boisterous acclaim at youth level that could have landed him (thank God) at Manchester United, the mitigated risk of his very next step taken by a decent club with fewer resources than the wealthiest dozen or so in the world, so that one of those wealthy dozen (or so) could then pay a lavish fee for his athletic services. It doesn’t end there. Here come the jersey sales, the endorsement deals, the EA FC cover, and yet more reels and memes and hypotheses: who Bellingham is or isn’t dating, where Bellingham was spotted just last night, is he or isn’t he recruiting another local boy done good in Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold. Birmingham gets to claim its moral victories whenever Bellingham’s Madrid wins things, because there isn’t a competitive match or known universe in which they will stand between the Galacticós and additional silverware. Dortmund, the team in the nascent middle of Bellingham’s career trajectory, gets to ponder painfully every so often upon what could have been.
A video from Jude’s black-and-yellow past, its speech deciphered by expert lip-reading, captures the young man yelling boisterously at the Dortmund fanbase after assisting or scoring yet another decisive goal: “Fuck the chat, I’m staying!” I arrived in Berlin literal days before the conclusion of that title run. Reading a piece like this one in the Guardian, you wouldn’t have been wrong to believe the soul of global football was at stake.
I’m supposed to hate all of this. Though I had precious little to say about it last season, the first of the Ange-ball era, I’m a Tottenham Hotspur supporter. I’ve watched clubs like Madrid, besides Madrid, and Madrid itself!, strip my favourite one clean of talent. Gareth Bale and Luka Modrić both justified somewhat acrimonious transfers away from Spurs, a “small club”, to go and achieve seemingly endless success at clubs with “ambition, winning pedigree, legacy,” and not simply: more fucking money. I’m supposed to hate this for Dortmund, for small clubs everywhere, and I’m supposed to dislike how many self-portraits Bellingham, who is 21, posts on his Instagram. But … no, actually.
I was riding the U-Bahn to work one morning, still not majorly rankled at being the only black person I could see for miles. I don’t and have never needed this, necessarily, to feel at home in a city. But it is helpful to have a reference point for your existence: as to why you wear a Yankee hat a certain way, for the odd melody of your accent, or else you’re sort of just floating across a large and relentless society — with deadlines to meet and money to make and online shopping to do. I believe I love Berlin; but most people here don’t look like me or Jude Bellingham, and so most strangers don’t really engage (even optically) unless they need you to shuffle out of their way. Many Saturday afternoons last season I’d come home just in time to witness the miracle of a Madrid game away, rescued at the death by the sheer willpower not just of Bellingham but a Real Madrid line-up suddenly full of brilliant black men.
If I am here to concoct narrative and attest to poetic justice, my posture was a little bit different the very next time I’d encounter the city: shoulders looser, boots louder, Yankee hat backwards, Etsy chain (ahem) swinging. I liked to think Germany too, not just Birmingham, not just black people in Europe, could be proud of this clutch, brash footballer it had helped refine and then gifted the world.
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This past summer, my friend and colleague Kristine introduced me and a few other friends and colleagues to the old Poststadion in Moabit. The former home of Union Berlin, it was also the venue for a 2-nil loss by the German national side against Norway in the 1936 Olympics — the one football match, according to the Guardian again, that Adolf Hitler ever attended. It’s now a centre of Berlin Pride, a safe space during the recent Euros tournament for the LGBTQ+ community (and friends) to commune and watch all the international football.
As a young lad watching highlight videos of England at Italia 90, I worshipped and modelled my own game on the on-field exploits of David Platt, Gary Lineker, and of course Gazza. I fell in love with Tottenham Hotspur primarily because their kit resembled that of the Three Lions. But the more you learn about how the world works, the less inclined and less welcome you feel waving even figurative flags during international tournaments. I blame my father for not teaching me more about the Zambian game, how to accept its limitations, so that I wouldn’t be so brutal towards that government’s insistence that it has nothing to invest in grassroots football; or towards the naked fact that a communal disinterest or distrust in philosophy, politically, tends to translate tactically in competitive sports — and therefore in little or no latches for me, a callous aesthete, to grab onto.
Premier League football, on the other hand, was my 7th birthday in London. It was my cousin’s backyard in Stevenage. It was a regular supply of Beano, Dandy and Buster comics, and Ribena, before I discovered Match magazine and Match of the Day and Jimmy Hill. It was New Labour and Britpop and FIFA 99. Then it was Love Actually and Red Dwarf and my uncle from Bath lecturing me about Remembrance Day and the war. Then it was Dizzee Rascal and Skepta and JME, and Galaxy chocolate and Gavin & Stacey. At some point, mourning my old man and all the football we’d watched together, it was Tottenham Hotspur.
I’d watch England games here and there. Allow my heart rate to soar if their boys made it deep into the knockout rounds. Fool around on the Three Lions’ YouTube page, which might just represent the most wholesome football content anywhere on the Internet. Pre-Jude, and pre-Kristine, I just couldn’t be arsed anymore — but now I have these pleasant memories, hustling back towards Hauptbanhof to catch our trains on school-nights, after bullshit analysis and tall beers and bratwurst and fries, all balanced clumsily on our laps and in the late glaze of fading summer evenings. Who will forget that Turkish run to the quarterfinals, how Neukölln came alive (when is it not, however) with car horns blaring victory and red flags waving from the window sills? Who will forget Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal, yet more beautiful brown people, dominating the entire tournament pretty much from Spain’s flanks? Who will forget, certainly not me, Jude Bellingham possessing the sheer audacity, the absolute balls, to attempt a bicycle kick in injury time, on the verge on elimination, and rushing towards the cameras to shush a skeptical world?
I want to hate Real Madrid, because I always have. I want to unfollow Jude Bellingham, and I shouldn't even be on Instagram anyway. But something about that particular business venture, which has gone and added no less than Kylian Mbappé to its portfolio, affirms my right to stand up, belong, and be counted — wherever in this world I happen to be. No matter what the score is.
