Héctor Bellerín Reflects on His Journey from Arsenal to Real Betis
Héctor Bellerín remembers the day the noise stopped and the numbers started.
He was 18 or 19, still more prospect than player, when Mikel Arteta called and asked him over. Bellerín thought it was lunch. Maybe dinner. It was neither. He walked in that afternoon 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 had only just begun to earn real money and was doing what young footballers tend to do with it: clothes, cars, the trappings that arrive before perspective does. He tried to keep the figures low. He felt embarrassed. Ashamed, even.
He left with something else.
“Mikel was the first player who showed me that I was important to him, that I mattered,” Bellerín says. “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 small summit around a balance sheet has stayed with him. So has the message. “The legacy he left is one I try to pass on so young players feel looked after,” he says, “and that’s an experience that defines Mikel very well.”
From protégé to opponent
More than a decade has passed. Arteta and Bellerín, 13 years apart in age, were once just teammates at Arsenal. Real mates, too. Then came the shift: captain to coach, colleague to authority figure. It was not always straightforward.
On Wednesday in Dublin, they stand on opposite sides for the first time. A pre-season friendly at the Aviva Stadium, not a title decider at the Emirates, but for Bellerín it carries a weight that goes well beyond conditioning and minutes in the legs. Now 31 and at Real Betis, he has never faced Arsenal. The only time it could have happened, during a loan spell at Sporting, a knee injury intervened so neatly that he still wonders if his mind played a part.
This time, there is no escaping the symbolism. His old club arrive as Premier League champions, led by his old friend.
“I have an incredible feeling of love for the club,” he says, settling into a sofa 30 miles west of Dublin, still in his training kit. The conversation loops and drifts: Serge Gnabry, Santi Cazorla, Nacho Monreal. The kindness of Tomas Rosicky, who once told a teenage full-back how to beat him in training. Bellerín now finds himself doing the same for José Antonio Morante, the 19-year-old winger who runs at him every day at Betis.
He talks about the darker side of the sport too. The abuse. The pressure. The way, in his words, football has become the “maximum exponent of greed” and how the industry can make his “blood boil”.
Yet he cannot walk away. He is “addicted” to the game, committed to it, and fiercely protective of the idea that he deserves his place in it. Strip away the fashion, the veganism, the environmental activism, the politics, and what remains is still a footballer who has always been one.
On this trip, though, his mind keeps circling back to Arsenal. There is warmth in every sentence.
“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.
“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.”
London, the Oyster card and a Sunday roast
The story began with a front door in Enfield. The Ridgeway. The Twitching family: Donna and John and their children, Tia and Ben. Bellerín was 16, straight from Barcelona, and Arsenal placed him in a house that became a bridge between two worlds.
Jon Toral, his teammate since they were eight, joined him. The pair would later scatter – Toral was in India last season – but back then they were just two teenagers learning England together.
“Roast dinner was a tradition,” Bellerín says. “I didn’t understand that on Sunday you only ate once and then leftovers.” He laughs at the memory. The ritual stuck. “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, the academy director, handed to the two Spanish boys was not a ball, but an Oyster card. Freedom in plastic form.
“Jon would put on Sky, watch all the games, then the darts, then the snooker,” Bellerín says. “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 London, he lived everywhere. He rode that Oyster card into adulthood. During the pandemic he ended up in a 17th-century farm in St Albans, the only way in a sand track, a world away from the Ridgeway but still within Arsenal’s orbit.
He watched from afar when the club finally climbed back to the top of English football. “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.”
Inside Arteta’s mind
The Arsenal that lifted the Premier League was not a surprise to Bellerín. He had seen the blueprint long before the confetti.
“I was talking to Nacho [Monreal] and Santi [Cazorla]: 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.”
Back then, Arteta was still in boots, still a teammate, but already thinking like the man on the touchline.
“In training he would ask: ‘What did you do at Barcelona? I would do this …’” Bellerín remembers. Later, when Arteta returned as manager, the conversations deepened and formalised. The influence did too.
“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,” Bellerín 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 transition from sharing a dressing room to answering to him was not seamless.
“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.”
Those conversations became more frequent as Bellerín’s Arsenal chapter edged towards its final pages. “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.”
Leaving home, finding roots
Why did he need it? The question hangs. Bellerín pauses.
“There’s not a specific reason,” he says at last. “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.”
Walking away from a club like Arsenal is not a clean break. “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 stood Real Betis, the club of his grandmother and father, and a city that felt like an answer.
There is a daily bike ride into training now. Writing classes. Fashion design. Veganism. Environmental activism. Public stands on toxic masculinity and the avarice of the game. A life that spills beyond the white lines without ever abandoning them.
“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.”
On Wednesday night, that existence folds back on itself. The boy who arrived in Enfield with an Oyster card and a Spanish accent will line up for Betis against the club that gave him his voice, his football and much of his identity, now wearing the crown he always believed they would reclaim under his old mentor.
He once left north London searching for home. In Dublin, he walks straight into his past.
