Real Madrid and England midfielder Jude Bellingham has been unveiled as one of six nominees for the 2024 BBC Sports Personality of the Year prize.
The 21-year-old became a La Liga and Champions League winner with Real Madrid in the 2023-24 campaign while excelling statistically, registering 23 goals and 13 assists in 42 appearances across all competitions.
Bellingham won a plethora of individual accolades for his exceptional first season in the Spanish top flight, including the La Liga Player of the Season and the Laureus World Breakthrough of the Year award for 2024.
The former Birmingham City and Borussia Dortmund protege subsequently played a starring role in England's run to the Euro 2024 final, scoring crucial goals against Serbia and Slovakia before netting one of the Three Lions' five penalties in their quarter-final success over Switzerland.
Bellingham has also hit a rich vein of recent form for Carlo Ancelotti's team in recent weeks, scoring in each of his last five La Liga appearances, and he is aiming to become the third footballer to win the award in each of the last three years.
Luke Littler, Joe Root to battle Bellingham for SPOTY prize
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Manchester United and England goalkeeper Mary Earps took home the 2023 prize after Arsenal's Beth Mead scooped the 2022 award, but Bellingham is facing some incredibly stiff competition for the honour.
Among the other five nominees is darts phenom Luke Littler, who at 16 years of age surged to the final of the PDC World Championship at the start of the year, where he finished as runner-up to Luke Humphries.
Now 17, Littler has won 10 major honours - including the Premier League Darts and Grand Slam of Darts - and he is also on course to surpass Michael Smith's record of 714 180s in one season.
At the other end of the experience scale, cricketer Joe Root dethroned Sir Alastair Cook as England's record Test run scorer a couple of months ago, hitting a personal best of 262 against Pakistan.
Prior to making history in October, Root had also beaten Cook's record of the most Test centuries scored by an Englishman, but neither he nor Bellingham or Littler are the favourite to take home the award.
Keely Hodgkinson the outright favourite to win SPOTY
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Instead, athletics sensation Keely Hodgkinson is expected to hold the trophy aloft after storming to 800m gold at the Paris 2024 Olympics, becoming the first Briton to win a track title at the Games since Sir Mo Farah in 2016.
Hodgkinson is one of three Olympic/Paralympic stars among the nominees for the 2024 prize, a list that also includes triathlete Alex Yee, the gold medallist in the individual men's competition and the reigning Elite world champion.
Finally, Paralympic cyclist Dame Sarah Storey is up for the award after remarkably winning Time Trial C-5 and Road Race C-5 events in Paris, taking the 47-year-old's Games medal tally to 19 golds and 30 overall.
Should Hodgkinson take home the honour as expected, it would mark the fourth year in a row that a female athlete has been named Sports Personality of the Year after tennis star Emma Raducanu was bestowed with the prize in 2021.
Prior to Raducanu's crowning, a male athlete had won the SPOTY trophy 14 years running, while Wales' Geraint Thomas was the last non-English nominee to clinch the accolade in 2018.
Ben Knapton
