Bellingham’s involvement was first floated when his father Mark – who doubles as his agent and advisor – met Knighthead’s co-founder Tom Wagner at a Birmingham City game last season. Knighthead mentioned the prospect of a third-party deal in talks with Warwickshire before the sale of stakes in Hundred franchises early last year, which the club flagged to the ECB.

New investors in the Hundred agreed to a five-year “lock-in” period where they cannot offload their stakes, but the Bellingham deal was permitted because it had been floated before Knighthead’s successful bid of around £40 million for a 49% stake in the Phoenix. The transaction was effectively done last summer, and formally completed in January.

“It was a relatively easy deal to do because Knighthead get the model,” Stuart Cain, Warwickshire’s chief executive, told ESPNcricinfo. “They’ve done it with Tom Brady, and they’ve seen the benefit he brings. When Jude was in the mix, it wasn’t a difficult conversation with them.”

Unsurprisingly, Bellingham has always been obsessed with football but is also a general sports fan. He spent Wednesday afternoon watching Rafael Jodar’s first-round match at the Madrid Open tennis, and has previously been seen at the Spanish Grand Prix and stopping by a training camp at NFL franchise Miami Dolphins.

But he has a genuine interest in cricket, dating back to his days playing age-group cricket at Hagley CC, near Stourbridge, and at Priory School, a mile away from Edgbaston; in a video recorded earlier this year to promote his involvement, Bellingham recalled running his younger brother Jobe out when they batted together: “The look that he gave me when he walked off…”

“It’s a long-term gig for Jude. He wants to keep it and stick with it, as do Knighthead. It’s about trying to build something meaningful for the long term”

Stuart Cain, Warwickshire’s chief executive

He also said that he regularly watches cricket around training – “I enjoy the Test games the most” – and has posted about recent Ashes series on social media. He follows a handful of cricketers on Instagram, including Jos Buttler, Virat Kohli and Chris Woakes, and named Ben Stokes when asked last year which athlete he would like to swap lives with for a day.

“It wasn’t like we thought, ‘Here’s a top 10 hit-list of personalities. Can we get one of them to invest?'” Cain said. “He’s not someone who is just going to come and throw a bit of money at it and then disappears again. He’s got an obvious reason to do this: he’s from the city and he loves the sport. It just all worked… He brings that magic dust to the Phoenix.”

Warwickshire largely dealt with Bellingham’s parents, Mark and Denise, throughout the transaction, while Kyle Kneisly, a Phoenix board member, led on Knighthead’s side. “You could tell that this was a passion for the family and something they wanted to do, both because they all love cricket and because they wanted to try to give something back to the city,” Cain said.

Bellingham bought half of his 1.2% stake from Warwickshire and the other half from Knighthead, leaving the two main parties with 50.4% and 48.4% of the shares in Phoenix respectively. He paid between £800,000 and £1 million for his stake, acting as an individual rather than through a holding company or family office; he will not have voting rights, nor will he sit on the franchise’s seven-strong board.

His schedule this summer is dominated by the FIFA World Cup in North America – which runs until the weekend before the Hundred starts in late July – but Warwickshire plan to show Bellingham and his family around Edgbaston after the end of Real Madrid’s season in May. They are also confident that he will attend a Phoenix match this summer, whether at home or away.

The Hundred has tried to leverage football’s reach previously when run centrally by the ECB. Harry Kane was a special guest at a London Spirit fixture in 2022, where he and Tottenham Hotspur team-mate Matt Doherty took turns to hit Ian Ward’s underarm throws for six in Sky’s coverage, while Lionesses Hannah Hampton and Lauren Hemp have also attended games.

Attempts to expand the sport’s audience have also included booking headline music acts like Rudimental, Bastille and Zara Larsson to play at Hundred matches, while Louis Theroux, Michael McIntyre and various Love Island contestants have been invited to games; McIntyre briefly appeared in the Sky commentary pod during last year’s men’s final.

But Bellingham blows them out of the water. The scale of his celebrity is made clear by one number: 41.3 million, his total Instagram followers. For context, that is 12 times higher than the most-followed active England player, Jos Buttler, and 500 times more than Phoenix’s account; a Reel confirming his involvement was viewed six million times within 24 hours.

The ECB is understood to be delighted with Bellingham’s investment, which it sees as an opportunity to reach people who have never previously engaged with cricket or the Hundred. Vikram Banerjee, the tournament’s managing director, effused on LinkedIn that the deal was “incredible for Birmingham Phoenix, incredible for the Hundred, incredible for English cricket!”

Warwickshire’s nirvana is for Bellingham to meet both Jacob Bethell, their men’s captain, and Davina Perrin, their first signing at last month’s auction, and for the trio to become the faces of Birmingham Phoenix. Bethell was born in Barbados, but all three spent their teenage years in the West Midlands and graduated from the academies of Birmingham-based clubs.

The club said when announcing Bellingham’s involvement that he would play an active role in “community engagement and CSR [corporate social responsibility] projects” and have already started to discuss the prospect of him becoming involved in a children’s league in the city. “We’re talking about an initiative around street cricket or tape-ball,” Cain said.

“He’s very keen to reach the parts of the city that haven’t got lots of grass around them, and trying to get kids who wouldn’t normally be exposed to cricket into the sport and create opportunities for them. We’re just trying to work out what that is and what it looks like, because there is some stuff going on in that space already.”

There are two major football clubs in Birmingham, and Warwickshire are conscious that Bellingham’s involvement could risk alienating Aston Villa fans who are already put off by the involvement of the owners of their local rivals, even commissioning research during initial talks with Knighthead last winter.

But they believe that Bellingham’s global profile and Knighthead’s wider investment in the city – they plan to build a sports quarter featuring a new 62,000-seater football stadium ready for the 2030-31 season – means it will not be a significant issue, and that only the hardiest Villa fans will snub Hundred games at Edgbaston due to their tribal loyalty.

Bellingham’s investment is unlikely to transform English cricket overnight, but his involvement is a mark of approval as the Hundred heads into its new era of private capital. “It’s a long-term gig for Jude,” Cain said. “He wants to keep it and stick with it, as do Knighthead. It’s about trying to build something meaningful for the long term.”