Héctor Bellerín Reflects on Arsenal and Mikel Arteta

Héctor Bellerín still remembers the ambush.

He was 18, maybe 19, new money in his pocket, new life in London, when Mikel Arteta called and invited him over. Lunch? Dinner? Neither. He walked in to find his captain sitting with a financial adviser.

“They started to ask: ‘How much do you spend on this? How much do you spend on that?’” Bellerín recalls. Clothes. Cars. All the usual temptations when the first serious wages land. He tried to play it down, gave low numbers. He felt embarrassed. Ashamed, even.

He left with something more valuable than a lecture. “Mikel was the first player who showed me that I was important to him, that I mattered,” he says. Arteta’s only request at the end of that uncomfortable meeting was simple: one day, do the same for someone else.

All these years on, that small, disarming act of care has grown into something bigger. It defines Arteta for Bellerín. It also says plenty about the full-back himself now, 31 years old, Real Betis defender, activist, fashion enthusiast, and still, at his core, a footballer shaped by Arsenal and London.

From teammate to coach to rival

Thirteen years separated them when they first shared a dressing room. Arteta, the veteran conductor in midfield. Bellerín, the flying teenager learning the ropes. They became close. “Real mates,” as he tells it. Then came the shift: Arteta, the coach; Bellerín, the player.

“Our relationship going from teammates to coach and player was strange,” Bellerín admits. “I’m not sure we knew how to manage the transition.” The hierarchy changed, but the history stayed. It meant they could still talk honestly, even when the conversations became difficult and repetitive, circling around the same conclusion: his time at Arsenal was coming to an end.

On Wednesday, in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, they stand on opposite sides for the first time. It’s only a pre-season friendly. It is not the Emirates. But for Bellerín, it is loaded with meaning. He has never played against Arsenal. The only previous chance, during his loan at Sporting, disappeared with a knee injury that arrived with such brutal timing he still wonders if his mind had something to do with it.

This time there is no escape. Just him, his current club, and his old one, now led by the friend he always believed would take them to the top – and has, as Premier League champions.

“I have an incredible feeling of love for the club,” he says, sinking into a sofa 30 miles west of Dublin in his training kit. The conversation runs. Serge Gnabry. Santi Cazorla. Nacho Monreal. Tomas Rosicky, who once told a young full-back exactly how to beat him in training so he could improve. Now Bellerín does the same for José Antonio Morante, the 19-year-old winger who runs at him every day at Betis.

He talks about the darkness of the sport, too. The abuse. The pressure. The greed that, in his words, makes his “blood boil” and turns football into the “maximum exponent of greed”. Yet he can’t walk away. He’s “addicted” to the game, he says. Committed. And convinced he has earned his place in it.

On this trip, though, his thoughts keep circling back to Arsenal. There is warmth in every sentence.

“There are still players I grew up with: Bukayo [Saka], Ben White, the manager, coaches, staff. It still feels like family for me. My appreciation and affection for them is immense. I became a footballer there.”

London, independence and a Sunday roast

The story begins on the Ridgeway in Enfield, in the home of the Twitching family. Donna and John, their children Tia and Ben. A 16-year-old from Barcelona suddenly dropped into a very English world.

He wasn’t alone. Jon Toral, his teammate since they were eight, arrived too. “Roast dinner was a tradition,” Bellerín says. “I didn’t understand that on Sunday you only ate once and then leftovers.” Years later, he found himself back in London, hunting down a Sunday roast in a Kentish Town pub – this time vegan. Those small details, he insists, have stayed with him. “Elements of my personality totally come from England.”

The first thing Liam Brady handed him and Toral was not a ball, but an Oyster card. Independence in plastic form. They earned €400 a month. It didn’t matter. Jon would sit in front of Sky Sports, devouring football, darts, snooker. Bellerín wanted to move, to explore.

“I would ask Donna: ‘Where can I go?’ Camden, Covent Garden … to Brixton to play pool.” Two buses and a tube to training. No chauffeurs. No bubble. “We didn’t feel either overprotected or abandoned.”

Over 12 years in England, he lived everywhere. The last chapter took him to a 17th-century farm in St Albans during the pandemic, down a sand track that felt a world away from north London. Arsenal, and London itself, gave him something he had been carrying but couldn’t yet express.

“I’m sure that my life, my way of being, of thinking, my conscience, all the things that represent me, were latent in me but they needed a place where they could be expressed. London gave me that space where I could explore my world, mature. There are places that could constrain you, but London was somewhere I could expand, explore life.”

Arteta’s imprint

When Arsenal finally ended their long wait for the league title, Bellerín watched from afar. He wanted to be at the parade. Betis still had games. Distance did not mean detachment.

“I was there in that moment of transition in Mikel’s first year as manager. But we won the FA Cup which was a key moment. One of the lovely things when they won the league was lots of people sent messages and I felt part of it. There are so many people I talk to, we’re all Gunners, and it was like a liberation, a release after so long.”

He speaks often with Monreal and Cazorla, the old guard who shared the dressing room with Arteta. “We were the group with Mikel,” he says. They all felt the same thing: with Arteta, the title would come.

“In training he would ask: ‘What did you do at Barcelona? I would do this …’” Bellerín spent a year and a half with him as his coach and came away convinced that most of his football brain belongs to Arteta.

“I could say that 80% of my football came through Mikel’s mind. His is a totally different vision. There’s an understanding, an observation, he sees patterns, and has a very specific language. I’d go so far as to say that he has put extra years on my career. I play totally differently to how I did at 19. That’s about experience but also a lot about what I learnt from Mikel: how to help my teammate, create advantages in my space. Bloody hell, I owe Mikel so much.”

That makes the break all the more delicate. He doesn’t dress it up. Leaving Arsenal hurt.

The fear of walking away

Why did he need Betis? Why then?

“There’s not a specific reason,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “Something happened but it’s not a thing; it’s more that there’s a kind of disconnect in which I felt that I could no longer help the club and the club could no longer help me. We managed that in the most amicable way.”

Sometimes it isn’t one moment. It’s a slow drift. A sense that the relationship has run its course. Even when you know it, acting on it is something else.

“Maybe I needed to be close to my roots, home. It had been a long time. When you leave a club like Arsenal, it’s scary, eh. Scary. It hurts, mate: look, however much you know that your moment is over, it was your home. You were there for 10 years, you leave friends behind, a life … you don’t know what you are going to find on the other side. I was lucky.”

Lucky, because on the other side waited Betis. The club of his grandmother. The club of his father. A city that opened its arms.

Betis, Seville and a wider world

At Betis, Bellerín found something that fit. The daily bike rides to training. Writing classes. Fashion design. Veganism. Environmental activism. Conversations about toxic masculinity, about money, about the way football devours everything in its path.

He rails against the avarice of the game, yet finds refuge in a dressing room that feels different. “What most struck me was the dressing room. There is something ‘horizontal’ in the relationship with other employees. At my other clubs that didn’t exist. That’s the essence of us, what sustains us. And it fits with my values.”

Seville, he says, has given him the freedom to exist beyond the pitch. To be more than a right-back who once sprinted down the Emirates touchline.

“In Seville I have found a city that embraced me, allowed my existence beyond football.”

On Wednesday night in Dublin, the lines narrow again. For 90 minutes, it is back to the basics: one full-back, one coach, one club that made them, another that remade him. The financial talks, the Sunday roasts, the sand track in St Albans, the title he watched from afar – all of it leads here.

He will face Arsenal at last, with Arteta in the opposite dugout and the Premier League trophy now part of their shared story. The question is no longer whether he belongs on this stage. It’s what comes next for a player who has already lived several careers inside one.