Why Real Madrid's Jude Bellingham walks alone on the pitch before ...

Before every Real Madrid game, the world’s most exciting young player prepares himself.

If you got to the Champions League semi-final against Bayern Munich early enough, you could have seen Jude Bellingham do what he always does. About an hour ahead of kick-off, while his team-mates were still in the dressing room, Bellingham was out on the Bernabeu pitch.

Nobody else was with him. He slowly strolled around, his AirPods in his ears. He very carefully and deliberately pressed the turf with the balls of his feet. He looked up at the vast stands above him. He became part of the setting. He took advantage of this brief moment of solitude.

A few minutes earlier, he was on the Madrid team bus as it was welcomed to the stadium by baying fans with flags and pyro. A few minutes earlier, he was in the Madrid dressing room, amid the buzz and energy of them readying themselves for the game. But for these few moments, he was in his own world.

Sometimes it is interrupted.

Before Madrid’s game against Alaves recently, his brother Jobe and father Mark were in the stands; Jobe punctured the focus by FaceTiming him from the stands, and once they had his attention, Mark did Jude’s trademark arms-wide celebration.

But for the most part — almost certainly including tonight as he tries to beat his former club Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League final — Bellingham takes this chance, before he gets changed into his kit and stretches out his hamstrings and does his shooting drills and short sprints, to warm up his mind before he warms up his body.

“I like to visualise the game,” he said in an interview with Real Madrid TV. “I see the pitch, the grass, my playing position… That way I feel calmer, I know where I’m going to be on the pitch. It’s something I’ve been doing throughout my career and thanks to that I go into matches without nerves and am prepared for everything. I was taught this from a very young age and I still practise it.”

Visualisation is not a new concept. It’s the sort of thing that most players, past and present, have probably done many, many times, some of them without realising it’s a psychological exercise, and its importance is made clear by how many players do it.

In 2021, when Liverpool were locked into one of their frequent Premier League title death matches with Manchester City, Mohamed Salah spoke in an interview with the Egyptian TV station about how he visualised a few recent games, including a 2-2 draw with City in which Salah scored.

“I watched YouTube and slept as usual, and before that, I performed meditation,” he said about the night before the City game. “There are many forms of meditation: you may do it for relaxation or by imagination to live the match. For example the Manchester City goal, I scored it in my mind before scoring it on the field, many times. Most goals are the same way.”

Salah inspired Newcastle forward Anthony Gordon, one of the better players in the Premier League this season, to take a more serious and structured approach to his own visualisation and meditation, as part of his preparation. He explained to Gary Neville on The Overlap podcast that he starts readying himself for games two days beforehand. He sits in a room, ideally on his own, and meditates.

“It’s not how you perceive it to be, sitting there with your legs crossed,” Gordon said, imitating the lotus pose. “It’s closing your eyes, getting in touch with your body through breathing. Then letting the game run: I start with arriving at the stadium, going into the warm-up, then the game and ultimately trying to see how I want to feel after the game, and then what I’d have to do to achieve it.”

If you ever wonder how footballers’ brains don’t turn to mush and lose the ability to perform the most basic of tasks when they have 80,000 people screaming at them, as you or I might, then it’s because of things like this. “It’s more of a coping mechanism of how to handle pressure,” says Gordon. “It allows me to react from a higher perspective than my own emotions. Being emotional is not the best.

“If a chance comes, it feels like I have already lived it, so I can feel like I’m present and trust my ability rather than overthink it. There may be loads who do the same but just haven’t talked about it.”

It’s something that came up in an interview with Wayne Rooney in 2012. At that stage, Rooney was still very much perceived as a ‘street’ footballer, relying mainly on instinct and, to be frank, had barely said anything interesting in public about football in his career to that point. But when he spoke to the journalist David Winner for ESPN, he explained his version of visualisation.

“Part of my preparation is I go and ask the kit man what colour we’re wearing — if it’s red top, white shorts, white socks or black socks,” Rooney said. “Then I lie in bed the night before the game and visualise myself scoring goals or doing well. You’re trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a ‘memory’ before the game. I don’t know if you’d call it visualising or dreaming, but I’ve always done it, my whole life.

“When I was younger, I used to visualise myself scoring wonder goals, stuff like that. From 30 yards out, dribbling through teams. You used to visualise yourself doing all that and, obviously, when you get older and you’re playing professionally, you realise it’s important for your preparation — and you need to visualise realistic things that are going to happen in a game.”

Bellingham’s version of visualisation is slightly different to those discussed by Salah, Gordon and Rooney. His is more of a multi-sensory approach: he’s not just in bed or a hotel room before the game, he’s in the stadium. He’s getting used to the sounds, the smells of the stadium, the way the grass feels beneath his feet.

“Athletes often refer to visualisation as what they’re seeing in their mind’s eye, but what they’re actually doing is experiencing imagery in all of their senses,” says professor Jennifer Cumming, a chartered psychologist and a specialist in sport and exercise psychology at the University of Birmingham.

“The best imagers are also the better athletes. They tend to incorporate lots of really useful information in their image. They’ll make it rich and vivid and detailed and as real lifelike as possible, as if they’re experiencing the real thing.

“The way an image is typically generated is by taking something from your long-term memory and moving it to your working memory, so you can use it.

“You can manipulate it: you can take a memory of you taking a fantastic shot at Stadium A, then translate it to Stadium B, and be able to convince yourself that this is what’s going to happen, almost to the point that athletes will say it felt so real they think it has already happened.

“They’re so convinced that was how they’re going to play, they just go out and do it. For a professional athlete, the goal is to do that every time.”

If they are doing it well, their visualisation will actually have physical manifestations, before the players have so much as touched their toes. “Their heart rates will go up, they will start to sweat,” says Cumming. “When you image a sensation like seeing something, similar areas of the brain are activated. It’s like a mental rehearsal.

“These neural pathways are being strengthened. It’s like you’re priming the brain to do things more effectively in real life. That’s why it’s a really important form of practice. Over time, they will become highly skilled, just as they would with their physical attributes.”

Bellingham visualising while at the stadium, so soon before a game, will have the added benefit of linking physical and mental preparation together. “Athletes will also visualise while they’re stretching,” says Cumming. “They pull the whole thing together so it’s not just something they separate, it’s just part of how they prepare.”

Footballers, particularly those at the very top, are surrounded by noise, by distractions. Cutting that out, being able to maintain some sort of focus, must be difficult at best, almost impossible at worst.

That’s why before every Madrid game, including at Wembley against Dortmund tonight, you’ll see the world’s most exciting young player quietly preparing.

(Top photo: Aitor Alcalde via Getty Images)

Nick Miller is a football writer for the Athletic and the Totally Football Show. He previously worked as a freelancer for the Guardian, ESPN and Eurosport, plus anyone else who would have him.