{"id":684112,"date":"2026-07-10T11:31:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T11:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/684112\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T11:31:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T11:31:10","slug":"haaland-and-bellingham-dortmund-friends-taking-centre-stage-in-norway-v-england-battle-world-cup-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/684112\/","title":{"rendered":"Haaland and Bellingham: Dortmund friends taking centre stage in Norway v England battle | World Cup 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

This World Cup<\/a> has been about the biggest names from the beginning but as Miami welcomes back its new favourite sporting pleasure on Saturday night, the man in with a shout of the Ballon d\u2019Or probably won\u2019t be the headline. With apologies to Harry Kane, in a football world moving past its two-decades-long domination by the Lionel Messi\/Cristiano Ronaldo duopoly, a pair of younger world-class stars will be drawing the majority of the glare as England take on Norway.<\/p>\n

Jude Bellingham and Erling Haaland have met regularly in the Champions League for Real Madrid and Manchester City over the past three years, but this is different. Their first encounter at international level is news in the front pages of the tabloids and gossip mags alike, Hello! running a feature entitled \u201cInside Jude Bellingham<\/a> and Erling Haaland\u2019s unlikely friendship before fierce Fifa showdown\u201d before Saturday\u2019s World Cup quarter-final in Florida. If Bellingham and Haaland were the game\u2019s next superstar rivalry in the years to come (again, with apologies to Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 and Lamine Yamal) they would define the competition in starkly different parameters to their Argentinian and Portuguese predecessors.<\/p>\n

Their bond isn\u2019t that unlikely, having been born 130 miles and just under three years apart, even though Haaland moved back to Norway with his family when he was three, when father Alfie retired. Both debuted for Borussia Dortmund<\/a> in 2020 with similar mindsets and aims. Bellingham arrived at the club seven months after Haaland but their fanfares had a lot in common, even if the Norwegian was older and had already excelled in top-division football. When the private flight containing just-turned-17 Bellingham and his family touched down near the club\u2019s training ground in July, Dortmund sent three cars to pick them up; one to bring the Bellingham entourage to HQ and the other two as decoys to lose the waiting media. BVB knew they were signing not just a prospect, but a true star in waiting.<\/p>\n

After Bellingham made his Dortmund debut \u2013 and scored \u2013 against Duisburg in September 2020, his teammate Thorgan Hazard remarked with some surprise that \u201che is only 17, but he plays like a man\u201d. The quote captures the effect when colleagues experience Bellingham first hand for the first time very well. Sometimes these exacting standards of himself and others spill over, with Emre Can publicly chiding Bellingham for calling out teammates on the pitch during a defeat at Bayern Munich on the way to agonisingly missing out on the Bundesliga title in 2023. \u201cIn front of 70,000 [spectators], there are a few things you can\u2019t do,\u201d Dortmund\u2019s captain said after the game in April 2023. Haaland\u2019s brutal outbursts, meanwhile, usually targeted himself.<\/p>\n

Jude Bellingham and Erling Haaland were good friends at Borussia Dortmund. Photograph: Lukas Schulze\/Bundesliga Collection\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The two years that Bellingham and Haaland played together allowed Dortmund to play at what they used to be, a top-level development platform for turning talent into megastars \u2013 even if in reality much of the squad consisted of established names on big wages such as Can, Mats Hummels, Thomas Meunier and Niklas S\u00fcle, and their two young stars were generational players who would have achieved world-class status anywhere.<\/p>\n

BVB did provide an environment in which Bellingham and Haaland gleaned a lot of joy while moving up to the top level. It was clear on the field and off it, with the duo making light of media duties \u2013 like the occasion they giggled as they hit each other with corny pick-up lines sent in to the club\u2019s social media channels \u2013 which Haaland in particular found an arduous distraction from the real business. If Haaland has often tended to come across as taciturn during interviews (just as Bellingham is sometimes pre-emptively combative in his) he has been a far less grouchy version of himself during Norway\u2019s odyssey in the States. Playing meaningful football in good company is a nod back to what it was like at Dortmund with Bellingham.<\/p>\n

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They stayed in touch after Haaland\u2019s transfer to the Premier League, and rumours surfaced in early 2024 that Bellingham was attempting to persuade Haaland to join him at the Bernab\u00e9u, before the latter inked an extended deal with City in the following year. Clearly, the former\u2019s admiration of the latter as a player and a person drove that, but there is perhaps a sense too of how much the pair could still do together.<\/p>\n

While they won the 2021 German Cup together, stylishly dismantling a good RB Leipzig in the final, the attacking incisiveness was framed around Haaland and Jadon Sancho, the third of BVB\u2019s English-born triumvirate of the time who has since drifted from the conversation. Bellingham performed well, though was yet to fully become the peak version of himself, still to be pushed into the more advanced positions that Edin Terzic and his coaching staff imagined the England<\/a> midfielder flourishing in.<\/p>\n

It could be argued that Haaland\u2019s exit to Manchester allowed Bellingham to recast himself as the team\u2019s epicentre, but it would also be interesting to see how they would fit together in a team where there is more attacking licence for Bellingham. We may eventually see, even if the path to that isn\u2019t currently obvious.<\/p>\n

For now, we will make do with a duel which could define this World Cup\u2019s business end \u2013 though if it continues, it will be on far more jovial terms than those shared by Messi and Ronaldo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This World Cup has been about the biggest names from the beginning but as Miami welcomes back its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-684112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}