From the outset, this World Cup has been dominated by football’s most celebrated figures, but as Miami once again welcomes its newest sporting obsession on Saturday evening, the player with a genuine Ballon d’Or claim probably won’t be the centre of attention. With all due respect to Harry Kane, in a football landscape moving past the two-decade grip of the Lionel Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo era, two younger world-class talents are set to command the spotlight when England take on Norway.
Jude Bellingham and Erling Haaland have faced each other regularly in Champions League clashes between Real Madrid and Manchester City over the past three seasons, but this meeting is altogether different. Their first international encounter has splashed across tabloid front pages and celebrity magazines alike, with Hello! running a piece titled “Inside Jude Bellingham and Erling Haaland’s unlikely friendship before fierce Fifa showdown” in the build-up to Saturday’s World Cup quarter-final in Florida. If Bellingham and Haaland were to become the game’s next defining individual rivalry in the years ahead (once again, with apologies to Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal), they would shape that contest along starkly different lines from their Argentinian and Portuguese forerunners.
Their bond is not especially surprising, considering they were born roughly 130 miles and just under three years apart, even though Haaland moved back to Norway with his family at the age of three when his father Alfie called time on his career. Both launched their Borussia Dortmund journeys in 2020, carrying similar attitudes and ambitions. Bellingham arrived at the club seven months after Haaland, yet their breakthroughs echoed one another, even if the Norwegian was older and had already shone in elite domestic competition. When the private jet carrying the newly turned 17-year-old Bellingham and his family touched down near the club’s training base that July, Dortmund dispatched three cars to collect them: one to take the Bellingham party to the facility, and two as decoys to shake off the waiting press. The club knew they were securing not just a potential gem, but a bona fide star of the near future.
After Bellingham debuted for Dortmund – and found the net – against Duisburg in September 2020, his teammate Thorgan Hazard noted with a degree of astonishment that “he is only 17, but he plays like a man”. That comment neatly encapsulates the effect Bellingham has on colleagues experiencing him up close for the first time. Occasionally his lofty demands of himself and others boil over, as when Emre Can publicly reproached him for chastising teammates on the pitch during a defeat at Bayern Munich on the way to the painful Bundesliga near-miss of 2023. “In front of 70,000 [spectators], there are certain things you simply cannot do,” Dortmund’s skipper remarked after the game in April 2023. Haaland’s fierce outbursts, meanwhile, were mostly aimed at himself.
The two years Bellingham and Haaland spent together allowed Dortmund to operate as they once had – a top-tier finishing school for converting prodigies into global icons – even if the reality was that a sizeable chunk of the squad comprised established, handsomely paid names such as Can, Mats Hummels, Thomas Meunier and Niklas Süle, and their pair of young stars were generational players destined for world-class status irrespective of their surroundings.
The club did foster an environment in which Bellingham and Haaland derived genuine joy while making the leap to the highest stage. That was apparent on the pitch and away from it, as the duo breezed through media obligations – like the moment they giggled while trading cringe-worthy pickup lines sent in to the club’s social channels – duties Haaland, in particular, viewed as a tiresome distraction from the real work. If Haaland has habitually come across as tight-lipped in interviews (just as Bellingham can sometimes be edgily combative), he has been a noticeably more relaxed version of himself during Norway’s American adventure. Playing meaningful football in good company serves as a throwback to what he had at Dortmund with Bellingham.
They maintained contact after Haaland’s switch to the Premier League, and rumours emerged in early 2024 that Bellingham was trying to lure Haaland to the Bernabéu, before the latter committed to an extended deal with City the following year. Evidently the former’s admiration for the latter as both a player and a person drove that pursuit, but perhaps there is also a sense of how much more they could still accomplish together.
Although they claimed the 2021 German Cup together, stylishly taking apart a strong RB Leipzig in the final, the attacking threat was largely built around Haaland and Jadon Sancho, the third member of Dortmund’s English-born triumvirate of that period who has since faded from the conversation. Bellingham performed well, but he had yet to fully become the optimal version of himself, still waiting to be pushed into the more advanced areas that manager Edin Terzic and his backroom team envisioned the England midfielder flourishing in.
It could be argued that Haaland’s departure to Manchester allowed Bellingham to reshape himself as the side’s hub, though it would also be intriguing to see how they might dovetail in a side offering Bellingham greater attacking licence. We may eventually find out, even if the path to that is not immediately apparent.
For the time being, we must make do with a duel that could define the business end of this World Cup – though if it endures, it will be conducted on much warmer terms than those shared by Messi and Ronaldo.
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