Jude Bellingham is just 20 and yet a phenomenon. It's intoxicating to see how he has captured the imagination in Madrid, a city in thrall to its new superstar, writes OLIVER HOLT

The sweltering heat of the sun is unforgiving and one of the digital billboards on the Paseo de la Castellana says the temperature is 40 degrees centigrade.

Car horns compete with the sound of the pneumatic drills that are finishing the spectacular renovation of Real Madrid’s stadium. It looks now as Old Trafford might look if anyone ever showed it any love.

It is cool inside, though, and at the entrance to the Tour Bernabeu, people stop to look at a big screen that is showing, on a loop, a montage of Real Madrid’s greatest moments in the European Cup and Champions League.

Rapt, the tour customers stare at the images of Alfredo Di Stefano leading the club to its first triumph in the competition in 1956 and the string of victories that followed. They watch as Predrag Mijatovic scores the winner in Amsterdam in 1998 that ended 32 years of drought.

They see Fernando Redondo’s famous piece of skill at Old Trafford in a quarter-final against Manchester United in 2000, nutmegging Henning Berg with a backheel, before sliding a pass across goal for Raul to tap into an empty net.

They see Zinedine Zidane’s magnificent strike in the 2002 final in Glasgow, that sumptuous volley, that celebration of sublime technical ability. They see Cristiano Ronaldo in his pomp and they see Gareth Bale’s overhead kick in Kyiv in 2018.

They watch Vinicius Junior scoring the winner against Liverpool in Paris two years ago and they see the film cut to reactions of Real Madrid fans around the world to the goal, to the explosions of joy in Nairobi and Salvador and Las Vegas and Warsaw and Buenos Aires. 

And as the film draws to a close, they see one final piece of action and one final image, chosen to illustrate the joy and the ambition and the youth and the hope of the modern Real Madrid. 

They see Jude Bellingham scoring the equaliser in El Clasico last year, a rasping drive, and then the aftermath of his late winner in the same game, running towards the corner flag, stopping and holding his arms out wide like football’s Great Redeemer as the Barcelona fans at the Estadi Olimpic in Montjuic shrink before him. The film ends. And then starts again.

Bellingham’s prominence in it is emblematic of the stunning first season he has had at the most successful club in world football. The kid is a phenomenon. Madrid is in thrall to him. Already, he is drawing comparisons with the best of the best, with Zidane and with Ronaldo.

He is not scared of the comparisons, either. He wears the No 5 on the back of his jersey, as Zidane, his hero, once did.

Bellingham is only 20 and yet, as he prepares to play in the biggest game of his young life, the Champions League final against his former club Borussia Dortmund at Wembley, he is already regarded as a leader of men.

Even if his role has changed in the last couple of months and he has taken on more defensive duties, it feels as if this is set up to be the Bellingham Final. He was the Bundesliga’s Player of the Year when he was at Dortmund. This week he was crowned La Liga’s Player of the Year after his debut season at the Bernabeu.

He has already won La Liga but it is winning the Champions League that would establish him as one of Madrid’s greats even at the age of 20. The Champions League is the tournament that matters here. It defines the club and the players who play for it.

The slogan A Por La 15 decorates shirts all around Madrid. ‘Let’s win the 15th,’ it means. That’s right: this would be the 15th time Madrid have won the competition if they get past Dortmund. To give you an idea of their dominance, AC Milan are next in the pecking order and they have won it seven times.

A few days spent in Madrid this week is enough to tell you that more people wear Bellingham’s shirt than the jersey of any other player in the streets and squares and bars of the capital. His name stares out at you from the racks of every souvenir shop.

He has captured the public imagination here like few others. He runs himself into the ground for the team, and the fans, like fans everywhere, love that. He is blessed with supreme technical ability. There is something intoxicating about someone so young carrying all before them and doing it with such grace and panache.

Bellingham has taken to Madrid like someone to the manner born. He has stepped out on football’s biggest club stage, a stage crowded with the game’s aristocracy, and instead of being intimidated by it, he has relished every single second of it. Seize the day, they say, and Bellingham has done that and more.

He will turn 21 during the European Championship this summer and he has been cast as England’s Great Redeemer, too, the player who can lead the nation out of the wilderness by helping it to its first major trophy since 1966. He already has 29 caps. If he maintains this trajectory, he will smash a lot of records.

But his ability and his popularity transcend national pride. On Tuesday, to general approbation, he was given that La Liga Player of the Season award after scoring 19 league goals from an advanced midfield role in his first campaign with the Spanish giants, outshining even the lustre of Vinicius and the class of Antoine Griezmann.

On Wednesday, Fabio Capello, who knows plenty about managing England and Real Madrid and even more about winning the Champions League but is not known for effusive praise, was effusive about Bellingham.

‘He is really from a different world,’ Capello said, ‘because he has quality, but he also has competitive strength. In El Clasico, he lifted Madrid. There were two or three times when he won the ball by sliding and the whole stadium rose to applaud him. One can tell a leader by how they behave on the field.’

Perhaps it would be wrong to say that Bellingham has shown increasing maturity at Madrid but only because he has always spoken with a wisdom and assurance beyond his years. His attitude, his deportment and his easy confidence are a tribute to him, to his parents and to his upbringing. 

His appearances in front of the media have been carefully rationed but on Monday, in another sign of his standing within the team and the trust with which he is regarded by the club’s hierarchy, he took his turn alongside Madrid’s other stars to face the massed ranks of the press at the club’s pre-Champions League media day.

Real Madrid is never knowingly undersold and their training ground at Valdebebas, not far from the airport on the outskirts of the city, is like a small town — a very affluent small town. It has its own stadium, Estadio Alfredo Di Stefano, ringed by giant replicas of the 14 European Cups the club has won. In the players’ car park, each player has his own space.

Bellingham emerged for training, laughing and joking with Federico Valverde before going through his warm-ups and playing in a series of small-sided games. He smiled later and said he had looked up at the crowds of journalists who had gathered to watch from the side of the pitch and saw so many people, he wondered if he was at Wembley already.

There were several hundred of us massed in front of three podiums, the first for television journalists, the second for radio journalists and the third for the press. Antonio Rudiger was one of the first to make his way down the line. Bellingham took his turn after Vinicius.

Someone asked him if he was nervous about the final. ‘I am nervous in front of you lot, to be honest,’ he said.

This is not intended to be a hagiography but Bellingham is a consistently impressive young man. On the pitch, the excellence of his performances has made him a superstar. Off it, he has the charisma and confidence that makes him a natural communicator.

He treads the line between being sure of himself and being arrogant with great aplomb. He talks with the kind of candour that others seem afraid to embrace. He is not a stranger to self-deprecation. He is not scared to admit vulnerability. He cherishes his roots in the Midlands, is loyal to his boyhood friends and makes us believe he is an everyman even though the scale of his talent sets him as far apart from an everyman as it is possible to be. No everyman ever had a gift like Bellingham’s.

So when he was asked if he had ever dreamed that he, a kid from Stourbridge, on the west of the Birmingham conurbation, would be playing for Real Madrid in a Champions League final, he did not dissemble or take refuge in the cliches of false modesty.

‘Yeah, I’ve got to be honest, I did,’ Bellingham said. ‘I always thought I could reach this level and this was always the level that I wanted to be playing at.

‘I probably never realised it would happen so quickly but I have been so fortunate in football, and in life, to have so many good people around me that have always just wanted me to enjoy the game for how it is and play with freedom. That still reflects in the way I play now and I am grateful for everyone.

‘I think the confidence I have comes from the belief that my family has always given me, team-mates that I’ve had, staff members all the way back to the academy. I have always been taught to dream as big as possible.

‘It’s a feeling I have always had growing up that I want to play at the highest level and I have worked hard, and there is a lot of luck involved as well. I will never go away from saying how fortunate I have been. Now I am here I want to enjoy every moment.

‘But it is a game I have dreamed of all my life, so it would be stupid now to get here and want to hide away from the occasion and not enjoy it. I understand the opportunity and I know that not many players get to play in a game like this. I don’t want to waste a second and I won’t take it for granted. I am enjoying the build-up and enjoying speaking to the media and I will take that same attitude into the game.

‘I have been around some amazing pros and I have seen how they have approached big games and I have stolen little things from them. It’s important to just be me and not worry too much about the emotional side.’

When I went to Barcelona in late October to watch El Clasico, Madrid was just growing accustomed to the new superstar in its midst. Bellingham’s equaliser came in the 68th minute and then he popped up to score the winner in the second minute of stoppage time. Almost every question to Madrid boss Carlo Ancelotti after the match was about him.

Gareth Southgate is still weighing up where to play Bellingham during the Euros and the truth is that he excels all over the pitch. Ancelotti deserves much credit for playing him further forward when he arrived at Madrid and unlocking the goalscoring form that took the league by storm. But latterly, he has moved into a slightly more defensive role.

‘This season,’ Ancelotti said in an interview with the Times last week, ‘we did really well at the beginning, Bellingham scored a lot of goals, but then in one match with Atletico Madrid they scored three goals from crosses because the right side was not covered.

‘So we changed and put Bellingham to help defensively inside. We adapt without making the players uncomfortable. Vinicius does not want to play inside, so I won’t force him to play inside. He doesn’t show his best quality there, so I have to give him freedom.’

So Bellingham is doing his job for the team. He is adapting. He is about the guts as well as the glory. At this stage of the season, he is the favourite to win the Ballon d’Or. If that happens — and much may depend on how he and England perform at the Euros — he would be the first English player to claim the honour since Michael Owen in 2001.

For now, all that matters is the Champions League final. When Real Madrid win titles, they are celebrated by players and tens of thousands of fans at the Plaza de Cibeles, near the Prado Museum, at a monument depicting the goddess Cibeles riding in a chariot puled by two lions.

A few weeks ago, Bellingham delighted the legions of Real supporters there by addressing them in Spanish to celebrate winning La Liga. Preparations are under way for a quick return if Madrid win the Champions League.

‘I always imagined myself winning trophies with these amazing players,’ Bellingham said at Monday’s media day. ‘When you have that sort of quality, the expectation has to be to win.’

For England’s wunderkind, Real Madrid’s pantheon awaits.