Jude Bellingham: England's New World Cup Star

Jude Bellingham arrived at this World Cup with a question mark hanging over him. Not from Madrid, where he has already bent the biggest club in the world to his will, but from closer to home. From England. From those wondering whether his North American form really justified a guaranteed place in Thomas Tuchel’s XI with another major tournament looming.

It sounded absurd even then. It looks downright foolish now.

With Morgan Rogers snapping at his heels for the No.10 role and high-profile creators like Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and Morgan Gibbs-White watching from home, the stage lights on Bellingham burned hotter than ever. A Real Madrid “Galactico” in an England shirt, expected not just to play, but to dominate. To decide.

He has done exactly that.

Bellingham opened his World Cup 2026 account in the way that has become his trademark: with timing, conviction and a sense of inevitability. England were wobbling against Croatia in a wild 4-2 win when he stepped up, thundering them back in front and setting the tone for a statement opening victory. The doubts that followed him across the Atlantic didn’t just fade. He ripped them up.

The pressure didn’t relent. Panama dug in, turned the game into a scrap, and for long spells England had to grind. Bellingham broke it open. He found the first goal in a hard-fought contest, the kind of intervention that never makes a highlights reel on its own, but which shapes tournaments. When the game threatened to drift, he grabbed it by the collar.

Then came Mexico at the Azteca. Altitude. Hostile stands. A last-16 tie heavy with history and noise. This is where great England talents have often shrunk. Bellingham grew.

He hit a quickfire brace in front of a raucous home crowd, turning a dangerous evening into one of England’s most memorable World Cup knockout wins. In a stadium that has swallowed up legends, a 23-year-old from Birmingham treated it like his own stage show.

Those moments are why the comparisons keep coming. Gazza. Rooney. Enigmas who could twist a match in a single surge or strike. Bellingham is carving out his own space alongside them, a modern midfielder with old-school swagger and a ruthless edge.

Former England defender Des Walker, speaking to GOAL in association with Wiz Slots, has seen enough to place him firmly in that lineage.

“He comes to the party, Jude, in the important games, in the important moments,” Walker said. “That's what Rooney does, that's what Gazza does, that's what all great players do.”

Walker didn’t stop at the technical or the theatrical. For him, Bellingham’s body is as much a weapon as his brain.

“He's a supreme athlete. He is the best athlete, probably in the world, in terms of the amount of running he can do and the power that he has from the first minute to the last minute. And more than anything, when Jude goes in the box, he goes in for one reason. He doesn't go in to make up the numbers, he goes in to get the goal.

“And I think that's a fantastic thing to have in your team, because the onus isn't just on Harry [Kane]. Jude will, in every game he plays, go to score a goal. And with his power, his athleticism and his will to win, it puts him in that category of the best in the world.”

It is that relentlessness, that refusal to drift to the edge of a game, that separates him. Some players decorate matches. Bellingham drives them.

Asked if the midfielder actively craves that responsibility, Walker had no hesitation.

“Definitely. He is the main man. He revels in trying to be the main man. I think that's what inspires him. He wants to be the show-off, the big head.

“That's all good being the big head and the show-off, but you've got to be big-headed and show-off on the pitch. He does that, and that's his strength. I think when you try to curtail that, we call it arrogance in sport, you need arrogance. You try to curtail that from him, you're taking away half his game.

“Because there's plenty of players, we've all seen loads of players that are off the park, they've got the biggest mouth in the world, they're cocky, they walk around like they're the best footballers in the world. Come Saturday afternoon, when you're playing the real tough teams, the big teams, sometimes they go missing. Jude doesn't go missing.”

The evidence is stacking up. From the “who else?” celebration at Euro 2024 to his latest interventions on American soil, Bellingham has embraced the burden that has crushed others. He doesn’t hide from England’s history; he seems intent on rewriting it.

Sixty years without a World Cup have weighed heavily on every generation that pulled on the shirt. If that drought finally ends this summer, his fingerprints will be all over it. Kane, the record goalscorer and captain, remains the reference point up front, the steady heartbeat of the attack. Yet it is Bellingham, cut from the same daring cloth as Rooney and Gascoigne, who is driving this campaign with a blend of arrogance, authority and end-product that England have long craved.

He asked, on that Euro night, “who else?”

Right now, for England, there is only one answer.