£114m England man delivers brilliant verdict on Sunderland's Jobe Bellingham amid transfer links

England and Real Madrid star Jude Bellingham has stated he gets “a lot” from brother Jobe Bellingham.

Jude, who cost Real Madrid a whopping £114million, will play for England at the Euros on Wednesday night as the Three Lions look to make it to a second consecutive European Championships final against Holland in the semis.

Jobe is coming ofd the back of a solid breakout season at Sunderland having joined the club last summer from Birmingham City. The 18-year-old has also become the subject of transfer interest from Crystal Palace and Brentford.

“Before every game, I always have a message from him, and every game he plays I always make sure I message him. We couldn’t be closer really,” Jude said about his brother Jobe ahead of the game against Holland.

“He has a really good mentality, thinks like me, he’s a really good young player, so I get a lot from him as well you know,” the England and Real Madrid star concluded.

Sunderland had rejected initial moves from Palace this summer, determined to keep the core of their side together as they look to push for a play-off place this season. That Bellingham had three years left on his current deal meant they were always fairly confident that they could keep him in the current window and transfer Fabrizio Romano now says that the player himself has decided he is keen to stay for at least one more season.

Sporting director Kristjaan Speakman said last week that he could not guarantee there would be no significant departures this summer but made clear that there was no need to sell any player. While the market is volatile and things can change quickly, it looks for now highly likely that Bellingham will stay in an early boost to new head coach Régis Le Bris as he plans ahead for the new campaign.

“I think it's really difficult to predict what will happen through the summer,” Speakman said last week. “I think all I can say on the player retention piece is that we've had a really strong record on that.

Obviously, fantastic news with young Chris [Rigg] signing this week, I think that endorses and echoes everything we've been saying previously, and like you said, we'll just take every piece of interest or every discussion that happens along the way for what it is at that point in time, which is really, really difficult to predict.

“I appreciate from a supporter's perspective, you want some certainty. I think the danger with the transfer window is it's always an uncertain period, but our intent and our objective has always been to retain our talent.

“As I've said before, I'd much rather get loads of interest on our talented players than be struggling to name talented players in our group,” he added. “So, I don't want to go into the individual ins and outs because those things always can chop and change. But as I said, I can reiterate our strategy and our intent is to retain our top talent.”