The camera swung into the night sky at the Stade Pierre-Mauroy in Lille, and it didn’t look good.
Television viewers had just been taken on a journey with Jude Bellingham as he dug deep to find one last burst of energy before Real Madrid’s Champions League game in northern France was up.
Charging into his defensive penalty area to intercept a cutback, Bellingham flung himself to the ground as he swiped the ball away, before clambering to his feet to chase his own clearance into midfield. Elbows swinging and chest out, he demanded a forward pass from Arda Guler, stepping into an awkward bouncing ball in a desperate attempt to keep his team moving up the pitch.
But as he flicked the pass into space, absorbing the full force of another challenge, Bellingham, along with the rest of us watching, quickly discovered that there was no one close by to help.
It’s easy to overanalyse a still image from a football game, but this was a scene that brought pre-season fears at Real Madrid to life.
Kylian Mbappe’s move to the Spanish capital this summer threatened to disrupt the balance of Carlo Ancelotti’s talent-stacked squad, and the sight of Frenchman standing flat-footed alongside Vinicius Junior on the left-hand side, leaving last season’s top scorer battling in midfield, has done little to alleviate fears over whether the club’s superstars can coexist.
Still without a goal to his name in club football this season — this time last year, he had already scored 10 — it is clear that arrivals have tempered the attacking freedom of Bellingham, who has been given increased responsibility to plug the gaps behind a luxury attack.
Madrid seem to have accepted that they will be more open with Mbappe in the side, and although Bellingham has slipped off the scoring charts, his importance from a functional, team-binding perspective has never been so high.
Bellingham himself has vocalised those extra defensive responsibilities this season, notably gesturing towards the front three halfway through the opening game of the La Liga season against Mallorca. “Finish the attacks,” he pleaded, “because the running back is f***ing hard.”
Since then, Bellingham has covered even more ground in each of his last four full La Liga games, hitting the 10-kilometre mark in each, according to data company SkillCorner. Alongside Federico Valverde, Bellingham’s box-to-box athleticism has been crucial in holding together the midfield throughout a series of increasingly end-to-end games, particularly when all of Rodrygo, Vinicius Jr and Mbappe start.
In that first game, for example, we can see Madrid keen to keep all of their attacking players close together in a fluid 4-3-3 shape. Vinicius Jr and Mbappe were happy to interchange on the left flank, while Rodrygo and Bellingham were encouraged to drift over and link up when possible, with Valverde pushing high too.
On this occasion, Mbappe wriggles into the penalty area and fires a low ball across goal, but Mallorca clear and find Takuma Asano up the pitch. In a matter of seconds, with so many players committed forward, the Madrid back four is left exposed, with only Aurelien Tchouameni sitting in a deeper role.
Bellingham makes up the yards, however, and not only snaps in with a crucial tackle in frame two, but then carries the ball up the pitch and lays it off to Vinicius Jr in space, having covered the length of the pitch twice in under 30 seconds.
It’s little wonder that Bellingham felt the effects of that game, nor is it surprising that he picked up a muscular injury a few days later in training.
The out-of-possession shape with all the big names in the squad lacks balance, and while Madrid can rely on their attacking firepower to mask structural deficiencies against sides such as Real Valladolid (3-0) and Espanyol (4-1) in La Liga, their strongest starting XI leaves too many spaces that can be exploited by higher-quality sides, placing an unsustainable strain on their midfield engines
Against Stuttgart in the Champions League, for example, Madrid conceded 1.9 non-penalty expected goals (xG), the most at the Santiago Bernabeu in almost two years. An alarming number of counter-attacks helped boost that figure, particularly when Bellingham left his midfield post to ghost into the penalty area, as below.
It was a game that provoked reflection from Ancelotti himself, contemplating Bellingham’s role to the Spanish press three days later. “What is Bellingham?” he asked, “is he a midfielder, a striker… what is he?”
In a top-heavy side so susceptible to counter-attacks, the 21-year-old hasn’t really had much choice but to curb the “motorbike” runs into the box that fuelled last season’s goalscoring form.
Many figures at the club expected that Bellingham would need to drop deeper to play a more creative role following the retirement of Toni Kroos.
The German’s effortless ability to dictate the tempo of a game, consistently picking out pinpoint passes, helped isolate Madrid’s tricky wingers against opposition full-backs. Without the speed and accuracy of those switches, Madrid haven’t moved opposition teams around as effectively, seeing them run into more settled defensive blocks.
In that respect, Bellingham’s tight-space dribbling and combination play are better suited to the midfield battle, where he can break through the centre with bursts of speed.
Here against Alaves, for example, we see Madrid in their 4-3-3 shape, with both Bellingham and Valverde motoring up and down the pitch either side of Tchouameni. As the Frenchman receives the ball, Bellingham times his run to burst in behind the midfield line, before receiving the pass, shrugging off a marker and prodding an outside-of-the-boot pass through to Vinicius Jr.
Ultimately chalked off for offside, Bellingham links up with Mbappe in a similar space 20 minutes later to assist his fourth La Liga goal.
That left half-space position is an area that Ancelotti’s recent switch to a 4-4-2 looked to target, deploying Bellingham on the left of the midfield four. It’s a system that brought more defensive protection — having sacrificed one of the front three for an extra midfield player — and allowed Bellingham to drift inside with more confidence to feed the forward players from that lucrative zone.
As we can see from their passing network in the 2-0 win over Villarreal, the centre is packed with well-rounded, high-energy midfielders who can stand firm in a 4-4-2 defensive block, while the creative abilities of Bellingham are close to the front two. Meanwhile, Dani Carvajal would look to offer width on the right with Rodrygo on the bench.
But a serious injury to Carvajal compelled Madrid to tweak things once again, with Bellingham shifting to the opposite side this weekend against Celta Vigo.
“We’re going to continue like that because the left flank is busier this year because Mbappe is there, he likes to drop in there with Vinicius,” said Ancelotti after the game. “We think we can be as effective on the right as we are on the left with Bellingham there.”
In the search for the perfect system, Bellingham’s ability to play multiple roles across the midfield, not to mention his tireless work rate, has seen him take just six touches and a shot inside the penalty area within the width of the six-yard box, a zone from which he scored 17 of his 23 goals in all competitions last season.
His touch maps below allude to that change in focus as well as his diverse positioning, the numbers telling us that he has taken around five touches extra in his own half per game this season, while his rate of tackles and interceptions per game is up from 2.4 to 4.4 at this early stage of the new campaign.
Teething issues were likely, and sometimes we should remind ourselves that Bellingham is just 21. His outburst against Lille, as well as another furious reaction towards Vinicius Jr on Saturday, are probably understandable in light of his age, his expressive nature on the pitch and a frustrating reduction in the volume of chances falling his way.
Ancelotti is always quick to play down any rifts, telling media that the trio were “talking, laughing” after the game, and that he is “very satisfied” with Bellingham’s contributions.
“He works hard on the field, always present, competing, fighting, sacrificing. The surprise is not this year, but last year, when he scored many goals that nobody expected. For us, it is much more important now the work he is doing rather than the goals last year.”
That work is enabling Ancelotti to keep experimenting until — he hopes — the most potent strike force in world football eventually clicks.
(Top photo: Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
