There is a sports bar in Dortmund where football fans like to congregate, and this week Wenkers has been as popular with visiting England supporters as it normally is with the locals. “The English like to do selfies in front of the sign,” one Dortmund resident said, explaining how they also often feel the need to take their photograph while making a sign not entirely dissimilar to the hand gesture that landed Jude Bellingham in a bit of bother with Uefa during this tournament.
After spending three years with Borussia Dortmund, Bellingham is sure to know Wenkers well. But what he may not appreciate is the impact his return to the city for Wednesday’s European Championship semi-final has had. Thanks to his immense popularity, there are actually Germans here supporting England.
“People will want Jude to do well,” one senior figure at Dortmund, who asked not to be named, told The Times. “Many people from the club will be at the game and, while I can’t speak for everyone, I would expect many local fans who have tickets to also be rooting for him.
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“There were no hard feelings towards Jude when he left for Real Madrid, even if he did then beat us a year later in the Champions League final. People remember how he went to the Dortmund fans before the game at Wembley. It was appreciated; the affection for him is still strong.”
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Our waiter at Wenkers echoed the sentiment. “Of course we support Bellingham,” he said. “He was a great player for us.”
Bellingham’s narrative keeps returning to Dortmund, whether in the form of his Champions League opponents or the 21-year-old’s very public clash in 2021 with Felix Zwayer, the German referee once suspended for his involvement in a match-fixing scandal who takes charge of England’s last-four encounter. Bellingham got in trouble for that too, despite members of the Dortmund hierarchy arguing that the teenager’s highly inflammatory comments had some factual basis.
For the former Birmingham City starlet, however, there is a further dimension to this game: an opportunity to address some unfinished business at Westfalenstadion given the nature of his departure last year.
Coming into the final game of the 2022-23 season Dortmund were top of the Bundesliga table and simply needed to defeat Mainz, a team with nothing riding on the fixture, to beat Bayern Munich to the title.
Sadly for Dortmund, their best player was injured and unable to participate because of a knee injury that, the aforementioned Dortmund director says, Bellingham had actually played with six months earlier at the World Cup in Qatar. “There was a debt to pay for playing on for England with that problem,” he said. “And it was collected when Jude had to sit out that last game.”
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His absence, the director explained, was something the club tried to keep from both the fans and Bellingham’s team-mates until the last possible moment, despite the player having also missed the previous match.
“He was named in the squad even though there was no chance of him playing,” he said. “It would have affected the mood of the fans as well as the players. Just having Jude there in the dressing room, on the bench, was better for the spirit of everyone.”
In the end it was not enough, with the fans packed into the 81,000-seat stadium — as well as an estimated 500,000 Dortmund fans who travelled to the city from every corner of Germany in the hope of celebrating a first league championship in 11 years — crushed by two first-half goals for Mainz, which secured a 2-2 draw, and a victory for Bayern in Cologne. It was Bayern’s 33rd title, their 11th in succession, with Dortmund’s misery compounded by Sébastien Haller’s missed penalty.
For 90 minutes Bellingham had been reduced to the role of water carrier, handing bottles to his team-mates from the bench. Now he was on the field, grieving with them, in tears. At one point he even pushed away a camera that was becoming too intrusive.
Fast-forward little more than 12 months and many of those same Dortmund fans will be with Bellingham in hoping for a happier conclusion.
