EXCLUSIVE
Jude Bellingham's current trajectory is leading him on a path to the very top of world football.
He possesses immense quality at just 20-years-old, but his former Birmingham City youth coach Mike Dodds - now Sunderland's interim manager - has seen it coming all this time.
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Bellingham was part of the academy at St Andrew's and impressed so much that he made his senior debut aged just 16.
The midfielder featured a total of 44 times in the 2019/20 season before sealing a huge move to Borussia Dortmund, where he spent three years in the German top flight.
Real Madrid came calling last summer and he completed his switch in a deal that could rise to £115million, which would make him the most expensive player in British history.
Bellingham has already scored 21 goals and assisted 10 in all competitions in his inaugural season in Spain having proven a leader on the pitch, with his elite mentality something he has showcased since his youth days.
READ MORE ON JUDE BELLINGHAM
Speaking exclusively to talkSPORT in September, Dodds said: "One thing he's always had from a very, very young age, he will never waste a training session, he will never waste a minute in the gym, he will never waste an opportunity to watch his clips back.
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"He's just so laser-focused in every area of his programme, he will never leave a stone unturned. If he feels he's got a deficiency in his game, he'll be almost like obsessive with fixing it. It's interesting now that we see that kind of quality that he's got in terms of bossing people around, being really driven is a real quality.
"Whereas kind of eight or seven years ago that was seen as, 'Ooo you've got to make sure he's humble, you've got to make sure he slows himself down, you can't talk to people like that.' It's like, 'Well he can, because he's got to be able to survive in the first-team dressing room' and listen there were times when he overstepped the mark.
"Of course there was, he was a young boy but what that did do, when we fostered and kind of enhanced that quality that he had, it allowed him at 16 to go in the dressing room and survive and then obviously take that on.
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"What you're seeing now is someone that's supremely confident in who they are as a person, he's gone to Madrid and people asked me yesterday, 'What do you see difference [is]?' I think he just looks happy, he looks like he's at a place in terms of Madrid where he feels he belongs."
Jude's younger brother Jobe is also showing huge amounts of potential, with the 18-year-old signing for Sunderland last summer.
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He still has a lot of time to reach the heights that his elder sibling has hit, with Jude being a star who has always been a bright spark from the start of his career.
"It's almost the perfect storm because they have these physical capabilities, I would say at that age, especially Jude at 16, he survived," Dodds went on to add. "I wouldn't say he kind of thrived but he survived at 16 in terms of the physical capabilities.
"But what kind of set him apart was just his general decision making and people talk about it now, his level of maturity, his decision-making on the football pitch. His ability to, not just in terms of on the pitch, but to hold himself in a first-team dressing room at such a young age.
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"That's the bit I think people don't really appreciate, 16-years-old, every single day, week in, week out, for the best part of a whole season, being in a first-team dressing room around players that weren't his age, but to survive and then go on and eventually thrive.
"At the back end of the [2019/20] season, it was obvious to Birmingham fans and it was obvious to the staff within the football club that he had to move on for the better of his career because he'd gone past the football club at such a young age."
It's not just at club level where Bellingham has impressed, with the Madrid star already amounting 29 caps for England.
However, he'll have to put national friendships aside when he faces Three Lions captain Harry Kane in the Champions League semi-finals this week, live on talkSPORT.