A former Chelsea scout has revealed the unusual lengths that the club went to in order to sign Jude Bellingham when he was a teenager at Birmingham City.
The Real Madrid sensation joined his boyhood club as an Under-8 in 2010, rising up through the academy to become the club’s youngest ever player when he made his first-team debut aged just 16.
Bellingham’s talent at youth level caught the eye of Chelsea, who were desperate to beat off competition from a whole host of other European giants.
And now former Chelsea scout Yousuf Saijad has revealed that the Premier League side even used a FIFA reel to help them stand out from the crowd in the fight to secure the midfielder’s signature.
‘We had a really good scouting team that worked across the top players, like Jude Bellingham for example, who was probably the most work I’ve ever done on a player in that season that we tried to sign Jude,’ Saijad told the Rising Baller’s YouTube channel.
‘We had reports on him from when he was an Under-12 and all the way up to Under-16 when he was at Birmingham.
‘We had like 62 reports from 25 different scouts and so when we got to a point where we felt like we wanted to sign him it was about how can we make what we present to him different from every other top club?
‘So we had all of the content that we needed from Under-12 to Under-16 from a reporting perspective so let’s try and create trends on what’s stayed the same for him as a player, such as his celebration, but at the same time pick up what he has developed and what he still needs to develop.
‘We then attached that with footage and had a real long video of him playing at 12, 13, 14 and all the way up and highlighting those traits and then at the end we’d put him on a FIFA reel in a Chelsea kit and trying to think outside the box really.
‘I spent a lot of my time on the end part where we were making decisions, presenting that information to players, collecting information and making it as unique as possible to get a deal over the line.
‘He was always on our radar from the moment I joined as a top talent to keep an eye on.’
Having made his Birmingham debut in August 2019, Manchester United tried and failed with a £20m bid in the January 2020 transfer window.
Borussia Dortmund finally prized him from the Midlands in a £25m deal six months later, making Bellingham the most expensive 17 year-old ever in football.
Two seasons were spent in the Bundesliga with the German giants, who sold the England star to Real Madrid for an initial £88.4m last summer.
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