Real coach: “A gift”
Carlo Ancelotti can’t get over Bellingham anymore
November 30, 2023, 10:50 a.m
Have you ever seen a player like Jude Bellingham? Not yet the coaching legend Carlo Ancelotti. After the next victory in the Champions League, the Real Madrid coach went into raptures and never stopped praising him.
Carlo Ancelotti put former BVB superstar Jude Bellingham at least on a par with one of the best footballers of all time, Zinédine Zidane, after his performance in Real Madrid’s 4:2 (2:1) win against SSC Napoli in the Champions League. He dominated the Real midfield between 2001 and 2006 and brought football into the modern age through his play. Like Bellingham, the Frenchman wore the number 5 jersey.
The Whites coach, who also coached Zidane early in his career at Juventus Turin, was deeply impressed by the performance of the 20-year-old Englishman Bellingham on Wednesday. He moved from the Bundesliga to the Spanish capital in the summer for the bargain price of just 103 million euros. Since then he has 15 goals and four assists in just 16 games. Next year he could fight for the title of best player in the world, the Ballon d’Or, with his former BVB teammate Erling Haaland.
“Zidane couldn’t do that”
It’s not that far yet. The future remains unwritten, but the past is an open book. Bellingham added a few new sentences to the already impressive first pages of his Real capital against Napoli. He not only contributed one goal to make it 2-1, but in the last quarter of an hour he drove the white ballet to their fifth win in the fifth game of the group phase. Deep into stoppage time, the former Dortmund player laid the ball on for Joselu, who scored to make it 4-2.
“It’s not easy at all to compare players from different generations,” said Ancelotti after the game when asked about the two stars with the number 5. Just to do it after all. Ancelotti is a polite person: “I see how Bellingham always manages to become dangerous in the penalty area. Zidane couldn’t do that. But he perhaps had an individual quality that Bellingham doesn’t have. That’s modern football. That requires physically strong players like Bellingham who can cover large areas of the pitch quickly.”
What Bellingham definitely still needs to learn
Once he got into raptures, nothing could stop the 64-year-old Italian. Bellingham, he said, was “a gift to football.” One that makes his coach, his teammates and of course the club’s fans happy every day. “Everyone is just delighted to see a player with so much potential and such a positive image.”
But Ancelotti still has one thing to criticize. “Nobody could have imagined how quickly he could adapt to our game idea and the club,” said the Italian: “Bellingham is a young, focused professional. He has arrived well with us. But he has to improve his Spanish. I say It’s always said: Nobody is perfect.”
The young Englishman already failed in Dortmund because of his linguistic perfection. The Englishman ignored the German language whenever possible. However, he was just passing through in the former beer capital of the world; he ended up in Madrid to stay and follow in Zidane’s great footsteps. So far he’s been doing it brilliantly.