Héctor Bellerín Reflects on His Journey with Mikel Arteta

The first time Héctor Bellerín really understood Mikel Arteta, there wasn’t a ball in sight.

He was a teenager then, 18 or 19, still dizzy from the first rush of Premier League money, when Arteta called and asked him over. Bellerín assumed food was involved. Lunch? Dinner? It was neither. He walked into a room to find Arteta sitting with a financial adviser.

Questions followed, rapid and precise. “How much do you spend on this?” “How much do you spend on that?”

Bellerín tried to play it down, pitching low, suddenly aware of the clothes, the cars, the careless spending. He felt exposed. Embarrassed. Ashamed, even. But he walked out with something far more valuable than a lecture on budgeting.

Humility. And affection.

“Mikel was the first player who showed me that I was important to him, that I mattered,” Bellerín recalls now, sinking into a sofa 30 miles west of Dublin, still in his Real Betis training kit. Arteta didn’t smother him with hugs, but he made it clear: this was care, not control. When Bellerín thanked him, Arteta’s response was simple: if one day you do the same for a teammate, I’m happy.

That, Bellerín says, is Mikel Arteta in a single scene. And it’s a legacy he has tried to pass on.

From London kid to opponent in Dublin

More than a decade has passed since that afternoon. The relationship has stretched and shifted with time. Thirteen years apart in age, Arteta and Bellerín were teammates first, real mates too. Later came the awkward, delicate transition to coach and player. On Wednesday in Dublin, they meet as something else again.

Opponents.

It’s only a pre-season friendly at the Aviva Stadium, not a title decider at the Emirates, but for Bellerín it lands differently. He is 31 now, a full-back for Betis, and he has never faced Arsenal. The one time he might have, while on loan at Sporting, a knee injury struck at precisely the wrong moment. The timing was so on the nose that he still wonders if his body simply refused.

Now, he will finally see the cannon on the other side, with his old club arriving as Premier League champions and his old friend on the touchline.

“I have an incredible feeling of love for the club,” he says. Every sentence about Arsenal comes out warm. There is no bitterness, no edge, just a deep sense of belonging that never quite left.

He talks about Serge Gnabry, Santi Cazorla, Nacho Monreal. About Tomas Rosicky telling a young full-back how to beat him in training, then watching Bellerín pass on the same trick to José Antonio Morante, the 19-year-old winger now trying to get around him every day at Betis. He talks about the darker corners of the sport too: the greed, the abuse, the pressure that “makes his blood boil”.

But he always comes back to the same thing.

He loves the game. He’s addicted to it. And he knows he deserves his place in it.

London, an Oyster card and a new self

Arsenal, for him, is not just the club where he became a footballer. It’s the place where he became himself.

“There are still players I grew up with: Bukayo [Saka], Ben White, the manager, coaches, staff. It still feels like family for me,” he says. “I became a footballer there. 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.”

It started far from the bright lights of the Emirates. A 16-year-old from Barcelona, dropped into Enfield, lodged with the Twitching family on the Ridgeway: Donna and John, their kids Tia and Ben. Jon Toral, his teammate since they were eight, moved in too. Two boys, €400 a month, a new language, a new culture.

“Roast dinner was a tradition,” he laughs. “I didn’t understand that on Sunday you only ate once and then leftovers.” Years later, he’d find himself in a Kentish Town pub hunting down a Sunday roast again – this time vegan.

The first thing Liam Brady handed him and Toral wasn’t a ball. It was an Oyster card. Independence in plastic form. Jon would sit glued to Sky, watching game after game, then darts, then snooker. Bellerín headed out: Camden, Covent Garden, Brixton to play pool. Two buses and the tube to training. Not overprotected, not abandoned. Just left to grow.

Across 12 years he lived all over the city, even spending the pandemic on a 17th‑century farm in St Albans, reached only by a sand track. London seeped into him: the culture, the politics, the freedom to think differently, to speak up.

“Elements of my personality totally come from England,” he says. The fashion, the veganism, the environmental activism, the willingness to talk about toxic masculinity and the avarice of the game – all of it grew in that space Arsenal and London provided.

Arteta the teammate, Arteta the manager

Bellerín watched the club change under Arteta, from the inside. He was there in that first turbulent season, the moment of transition, the reset. The FA Cup win that gave the project its first real jolt of belief.

“I would have loved to have been to the title-winning parade,” he admits, “but we still had games here.” Even from Seville, though, he felt part of it. Messages flew in when Arsenal finally lifted the league again. Former teammates, staff, friends. A shared release after so many years of waiting.

He talks about old conversations with Monreal and Cazorla. The three of them, plus Arteta, had always believed this was coming.

“We knew that with Mikel one day Arsenal would win the league,” he says. In training, Arteta would prod him: “What did you do at Barcelona? I would do this …” The curiosity never stopped. Later, when Arteta moved to the dugout, Bellerín had a front-row seat.

“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,” he says. “His is a totally different vision. There’s an understanding, an observation, he sees patterns, and has a very specific language.”

The effect on his own game, he insists, has been profound. He feels Arteta has added years to his career. He no longer plays like the 19-year-old who first burst through. He thinks differently, moves differently, sees differently. How to help the teammate next to him. How to create advantages in his space.

“Bloody hell, I owe Mikel so much.”

Not that the evolution of their relationship was easy. Going from mates in the dressing room to manager and player brought tension, uncertainty, a sense of not quite knowing the rules.

“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 honesty survived, though. The past allowed frank conversations, even as Bellerín came to a painful conclusion: he had to leave.

It wasn’t one dramatic showdown. It was a series of talks, stretched over a year, until both sides understood.

The break from Arsenal – and the pull of home

“Something happened but it’s not a thing,” he says carefully, searching for the right words. “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.”

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.”

What he found was Betis. And, crucially, home.

His grandmother and father supported the club. Seville offered him something different: a city that allowed him to exist beyond football, a team whose internal culture matched his values.

“What most struck me was the dressing room,” he says. “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.”

He cycles into training, writes, designs clothes, pushes sustainability projects, speaks out when football’s greed grates too hard. Seville has wrapped its arms around all of that, not just the player who sprints up and down the right flank.

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

A friendly that’s anything but

So here he is, in Ireland, about to line up against the club that made him and the manager who reshaped him. A friendly on paper, loaded with personal history.

He still messages old teammates. Still feels the pull when Arsenal win. Still imagines, with Monreal and Cazorla, the three of them going back to the Emirates one day just to sit in the stands and watch.

They were the group with Mikel, the ones who saw the first sketches of the project that has now delivered the league title. They always thought this day would come. Arteta did, too.

Now Bellerín will watch that fully formed Arsenal from the other side of the halfway line, in green and white, not red and white. He will close down Bukayo Saka if he has to. He will listen to Arteta’s instructions from the opposite bench, not his own.

He will compete. He will enjoy it. And as he walks off at the Aviva, he will carry the same thought he’s had for years.

He left Arsenal. But Arsenal never really left him.