Héctor Bellerín: From Arsenal Prodigy to Betis Rival

Héctor Bellerín still remembers the summons. He was 18, maybe 19, just beginning to taste the money and the noise of top-level football, when Mikel Arteta called and asked him over. Lunch? Dinner? Neither, as it turned out.

He walked in that afternoon to find Arteta sitting with a financial adviser. No small talk. Just questions. How much do you spend on this? How much on that? Clothes. Cars. All the trappings a young footballer grabs before he really understands what any of it means.

Bellerín thought he was lowballing the numbers. Even so, he felt exposed. Embarrassed. Ashamed, almost. But he left with something else.

A lesson.

“Mikel was the first player who showed me that I was important to him, that I mattered,” Bellerín recalls now, settled into a sofa 30 miles west of Dublin, still in his Real Betis training kit. “He demonstrates real care, if not through a hug. I said: ‘Thank you.’ He said: ‘If you do the same for a teammate one day I’m happy.’”

That moment, he says, is part of the legacy Arteta left him. A legacy he is now trying to pass on.

From protégé to opponent

More than a decade has passed. Arteta and Bellerín are no longer the young Spanish pair sharing a dressing room at Arsenal. They have been teammates. They have been coach and player, a transition Bellerín admits was “strange” and not always easy to navigate. On Wednesday in Dublin, at the Aviva Stadium, they will be something else again: rivals.

It is only a pre-season friendly, not a night under the lights at the Emirates, but for Bellerín, 31 now, it carries weight. He has never faced Arsenal. Not once. The only time he might have, on loan at Sporting, a knee injury struck at precisely the wrong moment. So perfectly badly timed that he still wonders if his head had something to do with it.

This time he will meet them as Premier League champions. And as a club he still describes with unfiltered affection.

“I have an incredible feeling of love for the club,” he says. “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.”

He goes further. Arsenal and London, he says, did more than make him a player. They gave shape to the person.

“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.”

From Enfield roasts to a 17th-century farm

The journey began far from the Emirates’ polished glass and steel. At 16, leaving Barcelona behind, Bellerín moved into the Twitching family home on the Ridgeway in Enfield. Donna and John, and their children Tia and Ben, became his first English household. Jon Toral, his teammate since the age of eight, joined him. Two teenagers, €400 a month, and a new country to decipher.

“Roast dinner was a tradition,” he remembers. “I didn’t understand that on Sunday you only ate once and then leftovers. That ‘journey’ was funny: last time I was in London I went to a pub to find a Sunday roast … but by then it’s vegan. Kentish Town. Elements of my personality totally come from England.”

The first thing Liam Brady, then academy director, handed to Bellerín and Toral was not a ball. It was an Oyster card. Freedom, of a sort.

“Jon would put on Sky, watch all the games, then the darts, then the snooker. We were earning €400 a month but there was a feeling of independence. I would ask Donna: ‘Where can I go?’ Camden, Covent Garden … to Brixton to play pool. We didn’t feel either overprotected or abandoned. We had to catch two buses and the tube for training.”

Over 12 years in and around London, he lived everywhere. The most surreal spell came during the pandemic, when he holed up on a 17th-century farm in St Albans, the only way in down a sand track. It was a long way from La Masia. A long way from Enfield roasts. But it was all part of the same education.

Lessons from Rosický, Cazorla and a future manager

On the pitch, too, he was learning. He speaks fondly of Serge Gnabry, Santi Cazorla, Nacho Monreal. He smiles at the memory of Tomáš Rosický, the veteran midfielder, quietly telling a teenage right-back how to beat him in training. A kindness he now repeats with José Antonio Morante, the 19-year-old winger who goes up against him every day at Betis.

The darker side of the sport came into view as well: the pressure, the abuse, the money. The sense that football, as he puts it, has become the “maximum exponent of greed”. It makes his “blood boil” at times. Yet he is clear about something else: he loves the game. He is “addicted” to it, committed to it, and convinced he deserves his place in it.

On this day, though, the conversation keeps looping back to Arsenal. To that FA Cup win in Arteta’s first season as manager, which he calls “a key moment”. To the title parade he would love to have attended but could not, tied up with Betis commitments. To the flood of messages he received when Arsenal finally lifted the league again.

“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 still talks to Monreal and Cazorla about going back to watch a game together. The old Spanish core that once gathered around Arteta in the dressing room, trying to piece together what the future might look like.

“We were the group with Mikel. We knew that with Mikel one day Arsenal would win the league,” Bellerín says. Even back then, on the training pitch, Arteta’s mind was whirring.

“In training he would ask: ‘What did you do at Barcelona? I would do this …’ [Later] I was with him a year and a half [as coach] and 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.”

From friend to boss – and the decision to leave

That debt did not make the shift from teammate to manager any less awkward.

“Our relationship going from teammates to coach and player was strange,” Bellerín admits. “I’m not sure we knew how to manage the transition. But face to face there was always that past there which meant we could talk honestly.”

The decision to leave Arsenal did not come in one dramatic showdown. It arrived in fragments, over months.

“I had decided that I had to go, but it wasn’t a conversation; it was lots of them going back a year. I feel huge admiration for him. And Betis arrived in the moment that I needed it.”

Why did he need it? He pauses. Searches for the right words.

“There’s not a specific reason. 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. Maybe I needed to be close to my roots, home. It had been a long time.”

Leaving still hurt.

“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.”

Finding Betis – and a city that fits

On the other side was Real Betis. The club his grandmother and father supported. A place that felt familiar even before he walked through the door. A city, Seville, that did not just tolerate his interests outside football – the writing classes, the fashion design, the veganism, the environmental activism, the willingness to talk about toxic masculinity and the greed of the game – but wrapped its arms around them.

He cycles into training. He throws himself into projects that have nothing to do with a right-back’s chalked touchline. He speaks, often and openly, about issues many players avoid.

“What most struck me was the dressing room,” he says of Betis. “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. In Seville I have found a city that embraced me, allowed my existence beyond football.”

That is where he will return after Dublin. After the handshakes and embraces with old colleagues. After the tactical chess match with the man who once sat him down with a financial adviser and asked him where his money was going.

On Wednesday, for 90 minutes, Héctor Bellerín will finally face Arsenal. Not as the kid on an Oyster card, not as the right-back learning from Rosický and Cazorla, not as the player wrestling with the end of his time in north London. As a Betis full-back, shaped by all of it, looking across at a manager he still credits with extending his career.

The club that made him and the coach who changed him now stand on the opposite touchline. The question, as another season looms, is how long that line between past and present can stay so clearly drawn.