Héctor Bellerín: From Arsenal Youth to Betis Star

Héctor Bellerín still remembers the ambush.

He was 18, maybe 19, a kid with a fresh contract and a fast car, when Mikel Arteta called and asked him over. Bellerín thought it was lunch. Maybe dinner. It was neither.

He walked in to find Arteta already seated with a financial adviser. No small talk. Just questions. “How much do you spend on this?” “How much do you spend on that?”

Bellerín tried to keep the numbers down, embarrassed by his own guesses. Clothes. Cars. All the usual trappings for a teenager suddenly earning real money. He left that house feeling exposed, slightly ashamed – and utterly schooled.

“Mikel was the first player who showed me that I was important to him, that I mattered,” he recalls now. Arteta didn’t give him a hug; he gave him something sharper. A lesson. “If you do the same for a teammate one day I’m happy,” the older Spaniard told him.

More than 10 years on, that afternoon still shapes him. It also explains a lot about the man in the opposite dugout this week.

From housemate to opponent

Thirteen years separate Arteta and Bellerín. In north London they were not just teammates, but genuine friends. Then came the shift: captain to coach, colleague to boss. Not always an easy evolution. On Wednesday in Dublin, they become something else again.

Opponents.

It is only a pre-season friendly at the Aviva Stadium, not a title decider at the Emirates, but for Bellerín it lands differently. At 31, now the Real Betis full-back, he has never faced Arsenal. He had one previous chance, on loan at Sporting, but a knee injury arrived with such uncanny timing that he still wonders if his mind played a part.

This time, there is no hiding place. Arsenal come as Premier League champions, led by the same man who once sat him down with a spreadsheet and a reality check.

“I have an incredible feeling of love for the club,” Bellerín says, leaning back into a sofa some 30 miles west of Dublin, still in his training kit. The conversation drifts easily: Serge Gnabry, Santi Cazorla, Nacho Monreal. The gentleness of Tomas Rosicky, who used to tell a teenage full-back exactly how to beat him in training. The way Bellerín now does the same for José Antonio Morante, the 19‑year‑old winger who runs at him every day at Betis.

He talks about the darker corners of the sport too. The pressure. The abuse. The greed that makes his “blood boil”, football as the “maximum exponent of greed”, as he puts it. But the game still has its hooks in him. He is “addicted” to it, committed to it, convinced he has earned his place.

And when the subject turns to Arsenal, the temperature changes. Everything softens.

“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,” he says. “I became a footballer there.”

He goes further. London, he insists, did not just give him a career; it gave him a language for who he already was.

“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.”

The boy on the Ridgeway

It began with a front door on the Ridgeway in Enfield. Donna and John Twitching, their children Tia and Ben, and a 16‑year‑old from Barcelona trying to understand a new country and a new club.

Jon Toral, his friend from the age of eight, arrived too. The pair shared more than a language; they shared a culture shock.

“Roast dinner was a tradition,” Bellerín remembers. “I didn’t understand that on Sunday you only ate once and then leftovers.” Years later, he would go hunting for a Sunday roast in a Kentish Town pub. By then, the meat was gone. The roast was vegan. The boy had changed, and so had his plate.

“The first thing Liam Brady, the academy director, gave me and Jon was an Oyster card,” he says. Independence came in the form of plastic and public transport. “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.”

He asked Donna where he could go. Camden. Covent Garden. Brixton to play pool. Two buses and a tube to training, then back again. “We didn’t feel either overprotected or abandoned,” he says. Over 12 years he lived all over London, ending up in a 17th‑century farm in St Albans during the pandemic, reachable only by a sand track.

The geography of a life, mapped in bus routes and borrowed rooms.

Arteta’s Arsenal, and the ones who saw it coming

Bellerín watched Arsenal’s title win from a distance. Part of him wanted to be on the bus, in the streets, at the parade. Betis still had games to play. Duty called elsewhere.

But he felt the tremor.

“I would have loved to have been to the title-winning parade, but we still had games here,” he says. “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.”

When Arsenal finally climbed back to the top of the Premier League, his phone lit up. “One of the lovely things when they won the league was lots of people sent messages and I felt part of it,” he says. “There are so many people I talk to, we’re all Gunners, and it was like a liberation, a release after so long.”

He was not surprised. Neither were two other old lieutenants.

“I was talking to Nacho [Monreal] and Santi [Cazorla]: it would be great if the three of us could go for a game. We were the group with Mikel. We knew that with Mikel one day Arsenal would win the league.”

Back then, Arteta the player would turn training sessions into seminars. “In training he would ask: ‘What did you do at Barcelona? I would do this …’” Bellerín says. Later, as coach, he spent 18 months under him and realised just how deep that mind ran.

“I could say that 80% of my football came through Mikel’s mind,” he says. “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.”

The relationship, though, had to change. Teammate to coach is not a straight line.

“Our relationship going from teammates to coach and player was strange,” he 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.”

Those honest talks eventually turned to one subject: leaving.

The break from home

Bellerín did not walk into Arteta’s office once and announce he was done. It took time. Conversations stretched back a year, circling the same conclusion.

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

Why did he need it? He pauses, searching for a clean explanation and finding none.

“There’s not a specific reason,” he says. “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,” he says. “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 was green and white.

Betis, roots and a different kind of dressing room

There is a family line that runs straight into the Benito Villamarín. Betis is the club of his grandmother and his father. Seville, with its heat and noise and looseness, offered something Arsenal never could: proximity to home, and a city willing to embrace all of him.

He cycles to training. He writes. He designs. He leans into veganism, environmental activism, questions of masculinity and money in football. He calls out the greed of the industry, then retreats to a dressing room that feels, to him, like a refuge from it.

“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 he found a city that did not just tolerate his existence beyond football; it welcomed it. The full-back who speaks about toxic masculinity, climate, capitalism and conscience has a place where those conversations are not seen as distractions, but as part of who he is.

On Wednesday night in Dublin, though, all of that folds back into 90 minutes. A green and white shirt on one side, the red and white of his youth on the other. The coach who once audited his spending now marshals the champions of England. The kid who left Barcelona at 16 now arrives from Seville at 31, carrying a decade of memories and a sense of unfinished business.

He will not say it, but there is a question hanging over this friendly, over this reunion, over that first tackle with Bukayo Saka or that glance across at Arteta.

How do you play against a club that still feels like home?