Héctor Bellerín Reflects on His Journey from Arsenal to Betis

Héctor Bellerín still remembers the ambush.

He was 18 or 19, fresh money in his pocket, fresh status in the Arsenal dressing room, 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.

“They started to ask: ‘How much do you spend on this? How much do you spend on that?’” Bellerín recalls. He was guessing low, embarrassed, suddenly very aware of the clothes, the cars, the clichés of a teenager who had just started to earn real money. He left with his cheeks burning and his perspective altered.

Humility. Affection. And a very clear message.

“Mikel was the first player who showed me that I was important to him, that I mattered,” he says. Arteta didn’t need a hug to prove it. He had something better: standards. “I said: ‘Thank you.’ He said: ‘If you do the same for a teammate one day I’m happy.’”

That line has stayed with him. So has the responsibility. “The legacy he left is one I try to pass on so young players feel looked after,” Bellerín says. “That’s an experience that defines Mikel very well.”

From protégé to opponent

More than a decade on, the roles have twisted and stretched. The age gap between them is 13 years, but the distance in their relationship has travelled much further: from teammates to captain and kid, from coach and player to something more complex. On Wednesday, in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, they will meet as opponents.

It is only a pre-season friendly. It is not the Emirates. Yet for Bellerín, now 31 and at Real Betis, it carries a weight that belies the billing. He has never faced Arsenal. Not once. The only time he might have – on loan at Sporting – a knee injury arrived with such neat, awkward timing that he still wonders if his body was simply telling him no.

Now, he will watch his old club walk out as Premier League champions, led by the man who once sat him down and went through his bank statements.

“I have an incredible feeling of love for the club,” he says, settling into a sofa 30 miles west of Dublin, still in his Betis training kit. The conversation flows. Serge Gnabry, Santi Cazorla, Nacho Monreal. The kindness of Tomas Rosicky, who once told a teenage full-back how to beat him in training. The same lesson he now passes on to José Antonio Morante, the 19‑year‑old winger who runs at him every day in Seville.

Then the darker side: an industry that makes his “blood boil”, a game that has become, in his words, the “maximum exponent of greed”. The pressure. The abuse. The ugliness that clings to the spectacle.

Yet strip all that away and something simple remains. He loves football. He always has.

He calls himself “addicted” to it, still committed, still convinced he has earned his place. On this trip, though, his mind drifts back to north London. To the club that shaped him as much as any family ever did.

“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. “My appreciation and affection for them is immense. I became a footballer there.”

And not just a footballer. A 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.”

The boy from Barcelona and a Sunday roast

It began far from the Emirates’ glass and steel. Bellerín was 16, straight from Barcelona, lodged with the Twitching family in Enfield, on the Ridgeway: Donna and John and their children, Tia and Ben. Jon Toral, his teammate since they were eight, moved in too. Toral would end up playing in India last season. Back then, they were just two kids thrown into a new world.

“Roast dinner was a tradition,” Bellerín says, laughing. “I didn’t understand that on Sunday you only ate once and then leftovers.” Years later, he found himself back in London, going to a pub in Kentish Town to hunt down a Sunday roast again – only this time, vegan. The culture shock had become part of him.

“Elements of my personality totally come from England,” he admits.

Liam Brady, the academy director, handed him and Toral Oyster cards on arrival. That was independence, in plastic form. “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 would ask Donna where he could go. Camden. Covent Garden. Brixton to play pool. Two buses and a tube journey just to get to training.

“We didn’t feel either overprotected or abandoned,” he says. They were simply set loose in a city that would stretch them, test them, and quietly turn them into adults.

Over 12 years, he lived in all kinds of places. During the pandemic, he ended up on a 17th‑century farm in St Albans, the only way in down a sand track. From Barcelona to Enfield to rural Hertfordshire: the path to the Arsenal first team was anything but straightforward.

He watched from afar when the club finally lifted the league title again. “I would have loved to have been to the title‑winning parade, but we still had games here,” he says. He had been there at the start of the Arteta era, that first turbulent season when the project still felt fragile, uncertain. They won the FA Cup together. He sees that now as a hinge moment.

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

The conviction came from what they saw every day on the training pitch. Arteta, still a player then, constantly quizzing him. “In training he would ask: ‘What did you do at Barcelona? I would do this …’”

Later, when Arteta moved into the technical area and Bellerín became his player, the education deepened.

“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. 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.”

Part of that is maturity. A larger part, he insists, is Arteta. “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.”

When it was time to go

It was never going to be simple when the man who had once been his mentor in the dressing room became the one deciding his future.

“Our relationship going from teammates to coach and player was strange,” Bellerín admits. He pauses, choosing his words. “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.”

Leaving Arsenal was not a single dramatic moment. No slammed doors. No sudden rupture.

“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? Another pause.

“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.”

He needed roots. Home. “Maybe I needed to be close to my roots, home. It had been a long time.”

To walk away from Arsenal is to step off a cliff. “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.”

Finding Betis, and himself

Luck, and something more. Betis was not just any club. It was the club his grandmother and father supported. A team and a city that felt like an inheritance.

He cycles to training now. He takes writing classes. He designs fashion. He lives veganism, environmental activism, a public stance against toxic masculinity and the greed he sees in the modern game. He speaks when others stay quiet, not because he believes he will change the world, but because he cannot quite bring himself to stay silent.

The dressing room at Betis became a refuge from the parts of football that repulse him.

“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. And it fits with my values.”

Seville, too, has wrapped itself around him. “In Seville I have found a city that embraced me, allowed my existence beyond football.”

He arrives in Dublin now as a veteran full-back, a father figure to younger players, a man who has spent as much time interrogating the sport as he has sprinting up and down its touchlines. Across the technical area, Arteta stands as a Premier League‑winning manager, the architect of the team that replaced him.

On Wednesday night, the pair will nod, maybe smile, and then try to beat each other. The friendly will be filed away as just another pre-season fixture. For Bellerín, it will be something else entirely.

The kid who once walked into a financial intervention will stand opposite the man who staged it, carrying all the lessons, scars and gratitude of a decade. The question now is not what Arteta has made of Arsenal.

It is what Bellerín, armed with those same values, chooses to build from here.