In June, the Jew Victor William Bellingham celebrated his 18th birthday, according to the traditional view he is of legal age, but still a very young person. According to the new standards of football, however, he is already a man in advanced years, in the 21st century the debutants are no more than 17, the trend is already tending towards the 16-year-olds. Jude Bellingham actually remembered the beginnings of professional sport a long time ago.
He had already played 40 games with Birmingham City in the English second division before joining Borussia Dortmund in the summer of 2020, and when he now played with BVB against FC Bayern, Bellingham was not a gifted teenager who was allowed to play too, but, as is so often the case, a decisive figure in his team. He is, as they say in the expert rounds on Sunday morning, a player who “goes ahead”, he is doubly qualified for this: through his footballing ability and through his unusual devotion, which sometimes takes on extroverted forms. Like on Saturday evening.
“You give a referee who was already involved in match-fixing the biggest game in Germany,” says Bellingham: “What do you expect?”
The proud Borussia player Bellingham had already taken part in the demonstrations that his teammates tried against referee Felix Zwayer and his decisions during the game. As is well known, there were enough opportunities. After the game, he continued the protests against the referee on a surprisingly aggressive note: he gave an interview to Norwegian television in which he referred to Zwayer’s involvement in the affair of the corrupt referee Robert Hoyzer. “You give a referee who was already involved in match-fixing the biggest game in Germany. What do you expect?” He rhetorically questioned Zwayer’s suitability and moral integrity.
The statement went “a huge step too far” not only in the opinion of Bayern boss Oliver Kahn. The DFB control committee initiated investigations, they were examining “the relevance of sports criminal law”, explained the prosecutor Anton Nachreiner. The issue is probably the offense of behavior contrary to sport, which could result in a ban. Referee observer Marco Haase should according to a report of the image-The Sunday newspaper even filed a criminal complaint against Bellingham for “insult, defamation and defamation”.
The Hoyzer case was almost 17 years ago, at the time Bellingham had only just been born, but his allegedly incomplete knowledge of the case – Zwayer was only a minor figure in the process – is likely to be less of a concern for the DFB lawyers than his own youth. Borussia boss Hans-Joachim Watzke immediately took the corresponding line of defense in a first statement kicker on: Bellingham’s sentence is “not wrong, even if he doesn’t have to say it,” said Watzke. “But that is also due to the emotionality that one has to admit to an 18-year-old. Jude did not offend anyone, he described a fact.”