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Jude Bellingham eager for Dortmund clash despite Jobe's absence
- Jude Bellingham is eager to face the club where he became a star
- Jobe Bellingham will miss the game due to yellow card accumulation
- Real Madrid take on Borussia Dortmund in the FIFA Club World Cup quarter-finals
The Bellingham family’s footballing trajectory is intrinsically linked with Bundesliga side Borussia Dortmund. The Westphalian giants welcomed Jude to the club in 2020, after he left Birmingham City at the budding age of 17. Having become a global phenomenon and established himself in the England national team, he joined European juggernauts Real Madrid C. F. ahead of the 2023-24 season. Meanwhile, his brother Jobe was making a name for himself at Sunderland, who, like Birmingham City during his brother’s time at the Midlands club, were plying their trade in the English Championship. Jobe's performances for the Black Cats caught Dortmund’s attention, and the North Rhine heavyweights captured his signature on 10 June this year with a view to including him in their FIFA Club World Cup™ plans.
Jude’s Real Madrid and Jobe’s Borussia Dortmund will lock horns in what looks set to be a thrilling quarter-final on Saturday, 5 July at New York New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. However, the brothers themselves will be unable to trade blows, after the younger sibling received his second caution of the competition during the round of 16 triumph over CF Monterrey, meaning that he will be serving a one-match suspension while his team‑mates battle it out against Los Blancos.
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Although there will be no Jude v Jobe encounter, the fixture will nevertheless serve up a reunion between Jude and the club that shaped him into the star he is today. Several clubs amongst Europe’s elite tried to secure his services back when he was being touted as one of the hottest prospects in the global game, but Jude and his family opted for Dortmund based on the sterling reputation of their youth development programme.
Bellingham arrived at Signal Iduna Park ahead of the 2020-21 season, and in the three years that followed became one of the finest orchestrators on the planet, winning the DFB Pokal and twice finishing as a Bundesliga runner‑up. In total, he scored 24 goals in 132 games during his time in black and yellow before signing for Los Merengues.
Swiss goalkeeper Gregor Kobel, one of the stars of Niko Kovac’s side in the round-of-16 bout against Monterrey, was one of Jude’s team-mates at the Ruhr Valley outfit. And he isn’t the only member of the current cohort to have teamed up with Jude: defenders Julian Ryerson and Niklas Sule, midfielders Julian Brandt, Felix Nmecha and Giovanni Reyna, and striker Karim Adeyemi all played alongside the talismanic dynamo. “It’s always great to see him again. We had two great years together at Dortmund. He’s a great guy, and he has a great family too. I also know his parents, and now I know his brother as well. They’re so strong mentally and very focused, but also really great people and an incredible family,” Kobel told FIFA.
Jude will be squaring off against Dortmund for the third time in a Madrid shirt as they etch another chapter into their shared narrative. In his first year in the Spanish capital, Bellingham faced his former employers in the UEFA Champions League final at Wembley. In that encounter, Carlo Ancelotti’s charges swept the 1996-97 Champions League winners aside thanks to strikes from Dani Carvajal and Vinicius Junior. Jude made the starting line-up and played 85 minutes in the final showpiece, winning the award for the competition’s best young player.
Months later, the duel was repeated as the sides were pitted against each another in the Champions League group stage, freshly revamped for the 2024-25 season. Ancelotti again opted to include Jude in his starting XI, and despite Dortmund going in ahead at the break courtesy of efforts from Donyell Malen and Jamie Gittens, the Bernabeu behemoths came roaring back to take the contest 5-2, thanks in no small part to an unstoppable Vini Junior, who bagged a hat-trick.
Since taking over at the Casa Blanca, Xabi Alonso has been looking to re-engineer Jude’s role, converting him from a box-to-box midfielder into a potent creator. Jobe, meanwhile, will have to sit out the quarter-final showdown in the United States, but the Yellow Wall faithful will nevertheless be pleased to see that he has settled into his new surroundings and gelled nicely with Karim Adeyemi and Serhou Guirassy as part of Kovac’s attacking trio. The back of his shirt bears his first name above the number 77, rather than the conventional surname. As he explained after signing, he visited Dortmund during his brother’s time at the club, and the place “stuck with” him. Moreover, in the 19-year-old’s words, he has joined Die Schwarzgelben “not to watch and not to follow anyone’s footsteps”: the younger Bellingham is determined to make a mark and write his own story.
