Two brutal words Jude Bellingham allegedly said about transfer decision Man Utd fans will find hilarious

Virtually every piece of plastic that has ever been created is still in existence. These artificial, man-made chunks have a habit of sticking around, for better and for worse. And because of that, there’s an inherent duality to the way that we view your acrylics and your polyethylenes. They prove so useful because of their staying power, and yet we freely loathe them for the damage they do and for lacking in a certain tactile authenticity. Plastics are like a nouveau riche despot - omnipresent, vulgarian, and tacky.

No wonder, then, that of all the insulting adjectives slung about in the gladitorial ball pit of footballing discourse, ‘plastic’ stings a club more than most. It connotes a superficiality, a lack of serious history. It is also a difficult stigma to shake. You can win as many domestic titles as you want, and sell as many replica shirts in the Far East as your factories can churn out, but the fact remains, if you’re plastic, you’re plastic.

And for what it’s worth, Jude Bellingham reportedly thinks Manchester City are, well, a ‘plastic club’. The Borussia Dortmund midfielder, a princely wunderkind of elven grace, is expected to leave Germany this summer, with his most likely destination understood to be Real Madrid. Other clubs, City among them, have been touted as doe-eyed suitors, but Bellingham - a measured character whose articulate wisdom heavily belies his age - is said to have dismissed the Premier League champions because they are, in his opinion, too lightweight, too flimsy.

Now, City fans will dispute this. Their rivals will no doubt find it hilarious. But it does provoke an interesting conversation on the nature of legacy, and the effect it can have on things such as transfers.

Why is it that a club can win the self-proclaimed best league in the world five times in six years, as City are surely about to do, and still feel as if they lack a certain gravitas? Why is it that Manchester United, for instance, can flounder without a title for an entire decade, and still find themselves included in every gossip column round-up that muses on the future of a world class talent? And how long, exactly, does it take for a ceaselessly prolific club to shake the ‘plastic’ mantle? If City remain the most dominant side in England for the next three decades, will we be sat here in the year 2053 discussing how Jude Bellingham jr. has snubbed them just as his father did? Or will, by then, their penance be through? These questions are not rhetorical for dramatic effect, but rather because no definite answers exist.

Of course, money talks, and in most cases it can blather loudly enough to drown out the naysayers. If City, with all of their dubious spending, win the treble this season - and have a bloody good crack at it again next - you can’t imagine anybody associated with the club sobbing into their pillows over something as relatively trivial as Bellingham’s rebuff.

But the fact remains that there are some things money can’t buy, and on rare occasions, like this one, City and their ilk are bluntly reminded of the inadequacies they’re striving to atone for. They are Jay Gatsby cloistered in his mansion, they are a hulking metropolitan skyline painted onto wood chipboard for a theatre production backdrop. They will have their history, but it will never be as vast as that of Real Madrid, or anybody else who started building theirs before them, in the same way that a younger brother, no matter who long he lives, will never be older than his eldest sibling.

Whether that makes City ‘plastic’ is a matter of petty perspective, but it certainly makes them a little less than they would like to be... for now, at least.