In England, the football offseason is called the “silly season,” because it is the time of year when—in the absence of any real news to report or analysis to produce—pundits and journalists are left to the purely conjectural work of transfer speculation. Because of this, it is also the time in sports fandom when we are all reminded that, even if football (or baseball, or basketball) is our escape from the real world, cash still rules everything around us.
March is not the silly season by any stretch of the imagination—March is when things are getting interesting, and they won’t stop being interesting until late May. But football fans are experiencing the first period of downtime for months over this miniature international break, which for many teams is lasting a little over two weeks. True, there was a break from Premier League football for the World Cup, but that was anything but a break from actual football-watching, and was actually a step up in frequency and intensity for many Premier League players.
And so this two-week lull represents the first period in a good while that we have had nothing to talk about, really.
Enter, without coincidence, the Jude Bellingham saga. Bellingham, an all-around midfielder, has nearly everything going for him at the age of 19. He is on top form for Borussia Dortmund, who are currently leading Bayern Munich in a two-horse race for the Bundesliga, which Bayern has won for ten years in a row. He has also represented England at the World Cup, and was arguably (read: certainly) their star. And he is widely expected to leave Dortmund in the summer, when (with two years left on his contract) the club can still marshal an enormous transfer fee for him.
Besides the performances and the data, there is a mythic air about Bellingham. Dortmund is a kind of finishing-school for top European talent, and the club’s stars almost always leave to other, larger clubs for massive transfer fees. Dortmund’s recent graduates include Erling Haaland, who has scored 28 goals in 26 league appearances this year for Manchester City; Christian Pulisic, the best current American soccer player; and Jadon Sancho, one of England’s best forwards. Bellingham may be the most exciting thing out of these four. Even the number he wears is shrouded in a kind of legend—his former academy coach Mike Dodds assigned him the number 22 because he thought Bellingham could play as a defensive midfielder (a 4), box-to-box midfielder (an 8), and an attacking midfielder (a 10). Of course, 4 + 8 + 10 = 22.
When Virgil wrote the Eclogues, which he penned during the violent period after Julius Caesar’s death in 44 BC, he predicted (in the now-famous Fourth Eclogue) that a boy would be born, under whose eventual reign the world would be perfected. Virgil wrote that, under the boy’s reign, toto surget gens aurea mundo (“a golden race shall rise up through the whole world”). Christians, not so long after, took Virgil to be some sort of early prophet, a seer who predicted the birth of Jesus a few decades before it happened.
When you listen to Liverpool supporters talk about Bellingham, he seems to have this same Virgilian savior quality, this messianic tinge, about him. In the last weeks, I have opened Twitter only to be barraged by “news” about Bellingham, which is very rarely news and is instead usually the deeply, cringingly sincere attempts of Liverpool fans to hold onto hope amidst a flat season. Bellingham will save us, every headline seems to mutter under its breath.
Take, for example, David Ornstein’s story this week that Liverpool are “increasingly unlikely” to sign Bellingham. To look at my Twitter timeline, which was full of Tweets already mourning Bellingham as a future Real Madrid player, one would imagine that Jürgen Klopp had done a press conference and said he had given up on signing Jude. But Ornstein’s story was, upon further inspection, really not very deep at all—he cited possible financial pressures on Liverpool, such as a possible failure to quality for Champions League football next year. Possible pressures. Possible trouble qualifying. The only real “news” that was Ornstein had spoken with “sources with knowledge on the matter” who think that “City and Real Madrid are in stronger positions at the moment.”
This, of course, is not news in any sense of the word. (Nor is this post an attack on Ornstein.) What all of this reveals, though, is how much Liverpool supporters are right now crying out for some kind of hero to save them—and how fragile and deeply held the emotions surrounding Bellingham’s transfer are. There was talk of signing him last summer, and then the talk changed—Liverpool were waiting to sign him this summer. Amidst it all, the waiting and the uncertainty, one empathizes with those earliest Christians who, hearing and believing in the resurrection, woke up each day expecting the Second Coming any hour now.
And so this miniature silly season has, as football seems always to do, managed to reveal very little in terms of the actual future. Bellingham may go anywhere. He may go nowhere. He may quit football next week, and open a series of themed pubs in his native Stourbridge, in the West Midlands. But what this little lull has done, if not reflect the future, is reflect ourselves to ourselves. “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” at least temporarily, is joined as Liverpool’s motto by that old line from Mark 1: vox clamantis in deserto. And who can blame a Liverpool fan for wanting, in the Beatles’ native city, to sing “Hey Jude” to a teenager who, even before his arrival, seems like some sort of messiah?