Jobe Bellingham is poised to swap Sunderland for Borussia Dortmund after the clubs agreed an initial fee of around £28m, potentially rising to £32m.
The 19-year-old England Under-21 midfielder, the younger brother of Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham, has just played a key part in helping Sunderland to secure promotion to the Premier League but is now following in his sibling’s footsteps and heading to the Bundesliga.
Jude Bellingham spent three years at Dortmund and his positive experience helped to inform Jobe’s decision to resist not only Sunderland’s attempts to persuade him to remain on Wearside but serious interest from Eintracht Frankfurt and RB Leipzig.
The younger Bellingham joined Sunderland from Birmingham for £1.5m in 2023 and, in the course of 90 appearances, has since been scouted extensively by clubs at home and abroad. Last summer he signed a new contract at the Stadium of Light but that deal was just as much about protecting his future value as tying him down to north-east England. Under the terms of a sell-on clause inserted in the agreement reached with Dortmund, Sunderland will be due 15% of his next transfer fee.
If, as expected, Bellingham passes certain milestones in Germany, and the fee increases to £32m, it will break Sunderland’s record for an outbound transfer, established by Jordan Pickford’s £30m sale to Everton in 2017. It would also make him Dortmund’s most expensive acquisition, narrowly eclipsing the sum they invested in Ousmane Dembélé in 2016.
In an interview with the French radio station RMC last week Régis Le Bris, the Sunderland manager, was unstinting in his praise for Bellingham. “The player is incredibly interesting,” Le Bris said. “He’s still very young and has enormous room for improvement. But his personality is also great; he’s extremely competitive, extremely intense. Jobe is a guy with a wonderful personality. It’s been a wonderful encounter.”
Sunderland have already sold the winger Tommy Watson, scorer of the winning goal in the playoff final against Sheffield United, to Brighton for £10m while paying Roma £20m to turn Enzo Le Fée’s loan into a permanent transfer.
