Héctor Bellerín Reflects on Arsenal and Arteta's Legacy
Héctor Bellerín still remembers the ambush.
He was 18 or 19, a flashy kid at Arsenal just beginning to taste real money, when Mikel Arteta rang and asked him over. Lunch? Dinner? Neither. He walked into Arteta’s place that afternoon and found 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. The usual temptations when you’ve just made it. He tried to lowball the answers. He felt exposed. Embarrassed. But he walked out with something more valuable than a new watch: a lesson in humility, and in care.
Arteta’s message was simple. You matter. Look after yourself. Then look after others.
“If you do the same for a teammate one day, I’m happy,” Arteta told him. It stuck. More than a decade on, Bellerín calls that moment a piece of Arteta’s legacy he now tries to pass on, a quiet act that explains the man as much as any touchline celebration.
On Wednesday night in Dublin, the dynamic shifts again. The former roommates in Arsenal’s dressing room, then captain and protégé, then coach and full-back, become something else: opponents. Arsenal, Premier League champions under Arteta, face Real Betis in a pre-season friendly at the Aviva Stadium. For Bellerín, now 31, it is anything but routine.
He has never played against Arsenal. The only other time he might have, during a loan at Sporting, a knee injury stopped him cold. The timing was so precise he still wonders if his body was obeying his mind.
This time, there is no hiding place.
“It still feels like family”
Thirty miles west of Dublin, Bellerín sinks into a sofa in his training kit and starts to talk. About Arsenal. About London. About football as an industry that often makes his “blood boil”. About why he still loves the game anyway.
“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 itself, didn’t just shape his career. They shaped his conscience.
“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 story began far from the Emirates, in a house on the Ridgeway in Enfield with the Twitching family: Donna, John, Tia and Ben. Bellerín arrived from Barcelona at 16, wide-eyed and homesick, and soon shared the house with Jon Toral, his teammate since they were eight.
Roast dinners were the first culture shock.
“I didn’t understand that on Sunday you only ate once and then leftovers,” he laughs. Years later, he found himself in a Kentish Town pub hunting down a Sunday roast again – this time vegan. The arc from confused teenager to environmentally conscious adult runs straight through north London.
The first gift from Liam Brady, then academy director, wasn’t a speech or a shirt. It was an Oyster card. Independence, in plastic form.
Toral would glue himself to Sky Sports, rolling from football to darts to snooker. They earned €400 a month, but the freedom felt priceless. Camden. Covent Garden. Brixton pool halls. Two buses and a tube ride to training. No chaperones, no bubble wrap.
“We didn’t feel either overprotected or abandoned,” Bellerín says. “Over 12 years, I lived in all different places. I spent the pandemic living in a 17th-century farm in St Albans where the only way in was down a sand track.”
Those years built more than a right-back. They built a person unafraid to talk about politics, environment, masculinity, money – and to challenge the sport that made him.
Love, anger and an “addiction” to football
Bellerín describes modern football as the “maximum exponent of greed”. The pressure, the abuse, the business that swallows people whole. It makes him angry. Sometimes it makes him sick.
Yet he is still “addicted” to it. Still committed to it. For all the fashion projects, the writing classes, the activism, he insists he is – first and last – a footballer, and that he has earned his place.
Arsenal sits at the heart of that identity. The club gave him a platform, a style, a way of seeing the game. It also gave him a circle of players and mentors who remain in his life.
He lights up when he mentions Serge Gnabry, Santi Cazorla, Nacho Monreal. He remembers Tomas Rosicky telling him, in training, how to beat him – a little kindness he now repeats with José Antonio Morante, the 19-year-old Betis winger who runs at him every day.
He watched from afar as Arsenal finally ended their long wait for the league title under Arteta. He wanted to be at the parade. Betis commitments kept him in Spain.
“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. 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 with Monreal and Cazorla about going back to the Emirates for a game together. The old guard, reunited in the stands, watching the project they helped launch.
“We were the group with Mikel,” he says. “We knew that with Mikel one day Arsenal would win the league.”
Inside Arteta’s mind
Long before Arteta became the intense figure in the technical area, he was the veteran midfielder asking the kid from La Masia what Barcelona did differently.
“In training he would ask: ‘What did you do at Barcelona? I would do this …’” Bellerín remembers.
Later, when Arteta moved into the manager’s office, the relationship shifted again. For a year and a half, Bellerín played under him and, by his own admission, rewired his game.
“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 switch from teammate to coach was not smooth.
“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 conversations became crucial when Bellerín realised his time at Arsenal was ending. It wasn’t a single showdown. It was a series of talks stretching over a year.
“I had decided that I had to go,” 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.
“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.”
Betis, roots and a city that fits
The “other side” turned out to be green and white.
Betis is not just another club for Bellerín. It is the team his grandmother and father supported, the place where family stories meet professional reality. In Seville, he found something he had been missing.
From the daily cycle to training to the creative outlets – writing, fashion design – and the veganism and environmental activism, Betis and the city have given him room to live as he wants.
“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. In Seville I have found a city that embraced me, allowed my existence beyond football.”
He talks about toxic masculinity, about the avarice of the game, about the need for sustainability. He refuses to be silent, not because he believes he can change everything, but because this is who he is now – the personality that started forming in Enfield and Camden, sharpened at London Colney, and now fully visible in Seville.
On Wednesday, all those threads knot together on the pitch.
The kid who arrived in north London with an Oyster card and a host family, the young pro stunned into financial reality by his captain, the full-back reshaped by his coach, the activist who rails against the game’s greed yet still can’t let it go – he walks out to face the club that made him, led by the man who, in his words, “put extra years” on his career.
A pre-season friendly on paper. For Héctor Bellerín, it feels a lot more like coming full circle.
