MARTIN SAMUEL: The next Gazza? NO. Bellingham is SO much more than that. They're both mighty talents who have lit up a World Cup, but Jude has a maturity that far outstrips Italia 90 star

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Paris Saint- Germain want him now. So that’s Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, PSG, Real Madrid and no doubt Barcelona once they work out how to rewrite the books again to afford it.

In this way, Jude Bellingham’s arrival on the world stage in Qatar is mightily similar to that of Paul Gascoigne in 1990.

In other ways, too. Bellingham’s youth, his confidence, his energy, his influence, is all an echo of a player whose creative peak came 13 years prior to his birth, but who remains a household name, even to this day.

Jude Bellingham is taking the world by storm with his performances at the World Cup

Gascoigne was the player of the tournament back then, just as Bellingham may yet be now, particularly if Kylian Mbappe and France are dispatched on Saturday.

There, though, the similarity ends. One was a boy, another a man, and the fact Gascoigne was 23 when he propelled England to within a penalty shootout of the World Cup final is no indication of where the separation lies.

Bellingham is 19 but plays as if he could be the veteran in a three-man England midfield beside two players with 111 caps between them. Jordan Henderson is at his sixth major tournament, Declan Rice has started a Euros final, yet Bellingham requires neither to hold his hand.

Against Senegal, there was a vignette after Harry Kane had been brought down again and was looking frustrated. It was Bellingham who went over, helped pick him up, patted him on the back and sent him on his way with words of encouragement.

Compare this with Gascoigne in Italy and his most famous image. He’s in tears having picked up a second yellow card in the semi-final. He now knows if England get through, he won’t be playing.

His arrival onto the world stage is similar to that of household name Paul Gascoigne at Italia 90

He can’t handle it. He’s gone. Gary Lineker is making signals to his manager, Bobby Robson, on the bench to keep an eye on him. To the outside world it looks a human, heart-warming gesture. Lineker is more honest about his motivation. He was trying to win a match, trying to win a World Cup final. The alert was as much to do with his own ambitions for the team as for Gascoigne’s well-being. It was as much to tell Robson that he may need to be taken off.

Bellingham has never been tested in the same way, but, one imagines, his reaction may be a little different. He has already captained Borussia Dortmund in the Bundesliga. It’s a different energy. When Germany’s best player, Michael Ballack, picked up his second yellow card of the tournament in the semi-final against South Korea in 2002, he reacted by scoring the winning goal, to make sure his country made the final, even without him.

Football aside, Bellingham is everything Gascoigne was not. Who ends up captain of a Champions League club in a foreign country, and in a major league no less, at the age of 19, having arrived two years before?

But the 19-year-old Bellingham is playing with a maturity that is way beyond his tender years

Older than Bellingham is now, Gascoigne was still in England’s Under 21 squad and B team. At the Toulon tournament, after he came to prominence, it was clear this was a maverick personality on field and off. The team were staying at a hotel in Sanary-sur-Mer and one afternoon, Gascoigne spied a team-mate in the harbour from his window. 

Seizing an orange, he aimed it with the fullest force, inadvertently parting the hair of England’s Under 21 manager Dave Sexton, who had stepped into view. Can’t imagine Bellingham doing that.

Nor getting on the piano at the Zurich Hilton to celebrate a 2-0 victory over Switzerland B in a session that lasted until 6am. Gascoigne had scored the greatest goal I have ever seen that night, perhaps made even more special in the memory because it was in front of just 950 people and no footage exists.

It echoed a Roy of the Rovers cartoon panel, one where he picks the ball up deep in his own half and slaloms through an entire team. At the end, Gascoigne looked to his left and saw Steve Bull, thought of rolling it square to give his team-mate the simplest tap-in, but decided to hell with that and took it around goalkeeper Stephan Lehmann to score instead.

Later, the team and a handful of journalists retired to the bar and drank champagne until it was time to leave for a plane to Reykjavik.

Football aside, Bellingham is everything Gascoigne was not - his mature persona is completely the opposite to Gazza's maverick and childlike personality

Gascoigne played piano and then took the hotel’s cash register, which printed out the record of the night’s takings, and proceeded to shred and throw the paper in the air like confetti. Hotel staff were not impressed. Probably not the kind of action that gets a man the captaincy at Dortmund.

Gascoigne did play abroad with Lazio, but his contribution to European football culture was to teach a squad of mainly Italian fitness obsessives how to get blasted on cigars by soaking them in brandy and leaving them to dry on the window sill.

It was amid one such party at a pre-season training camp in Wuppertall that a furious knocking at the door revealed German internationals Thomas Doll and Karl-Heinz Riedle in their underpants complaining that they couldn’t sleep for the noise.

Riedle went on to play for, and Doll manage, Borussia Dortmund, so it is safe to deduce how Gascoigne’s antics would have been received in the world of Bellingham.

They merit comparison because they are both midfielders, both great, and both hit the public between the eyes at a World Cup. Yet if Bellingham has an antecedent it is not the man-child Gascoigne. It is not even Bryan Robson, the famed Captain Marvel, with whom he is also often compared. We have to go back even further — to the 1950s and Duncan Edwards, born six miles north of Bellingham’s Stourbridge home in Dudley.

England's next household name has already captained Borussia Dortmund in the Bundesliga

Edwards died in the Munich air crash at the age of 21, but it was already accepted he would be a captain for club and country, maybe even England’s captain at the 1966 World Cup had he lived. His maturity as a young man, not just his brilliance on the football field, is what makes the connection to Bellingham.

When Adam Lallana wrote about Bellingham in The Times this week, he said he told his son, Arthur, to watch him, not just the footballer.

‘I want him to watch how well-mannered he is in his interviews,’ wrote Lallana. ‘I want him to listen to how he speaks to the camera. His enthusiasm. How humble he is, despite the success he is having and the attention that is falling on him as the breakout star of this World Cup.’

He painted a portrait of teenage maturity, of a player old beyond his years.

Gascoigne was a quite wonderful footballer and never better than in 1990, but even then, nobody thought they were watching a study in emotional continence.

There has never been a footballer who looked less suited to the levels of fame and pressure that greatness delivers than Gascoigne.

There has never been a young man who looks more capable around it than Bellingham. They are certainly similar, but, at the same time, they are a world apart.