Jude Bellingham Reflects on England's Euro 2024 Journey

Jude Bellingham does not dress it up. England reached the Euro 2024 final, came within one game of ending decades of hurt, and yet the midfielder remembers a camp that never truly felt together.

Two years on, standing in the United States as England prepare for a World Cup under Thomas Tuchel, he is blunt about what went wrong in Germany.

“At the Euros I think we got a few things wrong off the pitch, I don’t feel the group connected as well as it could have for a number of reasons,” he said.

A team tipped as one of the favourites never quite looked or felt like one. Results came, performances rarely did.

England staggered through that tournament. They needed Bellingham’s acrobatic, stoppage-time overhead kick just to drag Slovakia into extra time in the last 16. They edged past Switzerland on penalties in the quarter-finals. They then relied on another late winner to squeeze by the Netherlands in the semi-finals. A final reached, but not exactly with a swagger.

“We weren’t playing well, which doesn’t help, so even when we were winning, we didn’t get the feeling that we were as happy as we should be,” Bellingham admitted.

That overhead kick against Slovakia has already been spliced into montages and memory. For many, it is one of England’s great tournament moments. For the player who scored it, the emotion is more complicated.

“I still remember how I was feeling at the time. It always makes me feel a bit uncomfortable because it was such a bad situation,” the Real Madrid midfielder said. “We weren't playing well. I remember as a kid watching World Cups and Euros where we crashed out against teams we shouldn’t have gone out to and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m about to be a part of one of those moments’. It shakes up the whole of English football.”

That sense of unease hangs over his recollection of Euro 2024: a campaign that went deep into July but never quite convinced the dressing room that everything was in place. The football was scratchy. The mood, by his account, never fully knitted together.

Tuchel has identified exactly that fault line. Since taking over from Gareth Southgate, the new England manager has talked openly about building a “brotherhood” inside the squad as he chases the World Cup this summer. The word is deliberate. So is the contrast with what Bellingham describes from two years ago.

This time, the 21-year-old finds himself in a very different kind of battle: not to save England from humiliation, but to secure his own starting place.

Bellingham is locked in what looks like a straight shootout with Morgan Rogers for the number 10 role in Tuchel’s system ahead of Wednesday’s World Cup opener against Croatia. On paper, it is ruthless. In reality, it is layered with history.

The two grew up in the same patch of the West Midlands, shared junior pitches and early dreams. Now they share a position in one of the most scrutinised teams on the planet.

“As a person, he is a top guy, he can get along with anyone, can have conversations with anyone,” Bellingham said of Rogers. “He can be a bit loud. We have debates that turn into arguments a lot. But we get on like brothers, to be fair.”

The competition is real. The resentment, he insists, is not.

“The manager has made it very clear in a lot of the times where he has spoken that we are playing for the same position,” Bellingham explained. “I know that has eased up a bit more now that he sees me playing more positions and Morgs playing more positions, but I honestly have no ill feelings when he is playing and I’m not playing.”

If Tuchel wanted evidence that Bellingham can be the heartbeat of this side, he got it in the final warm-up game. The midfielder delivered a masterful display in the win over Costa Rica on Wednesday, a performance that strengthened his claim to that central creative role and reminded everyone why he is already a star at Real Madrid.

The contrast with the player who walked off pitches in Germany feeling disconnected from the wider group is striking. Then, he was a young talisman carrying a fractured camp. Now, he speaks like a senior figure determined that England’s internal culture matches their external expectations.

Tuchel’s “brotherhood” will be tested quickly. Croatia on Wednesday, the weight of a nation again, and a squad trying to prove that the lessons of Euro 2024 have been absorbed rather than ignored. Bellingham has already lived through one near-miss that never truly felt right.

He sounds determined that the next chapter will not be defined by the same regrets.