Héctor Bellerín's Journey: From Arsenal Teammate to Betis Rival

The call came when Héctor Bellerín was barely out of boyhood, 18 or 19 and just beginning to taste real money. Mikel Arteta rang and asked him over. Lunch? Dinner? Neither, as it turned out.

He walked into a room that afternoon 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, fresh to the first‑team bubble, guessed low. Clothes. Cars. All the trappings of a young footballer who has suddenly gone from academy wages to Premier League money. He felt exposed. Embarrassed. Ashamed, even. But he walked away with something he still carries.

Humility. And affection.

“Mikel was the first player who showed me that I was important to him, that I mattered,” Bellerín recalls now, sunk into a sofa 30 miles west of Dublin, still in his Real Betis training kit. “He demonstrates real care, if not through a hug.” When Bellerín thanked him, Arteta’s reply was simple: if one day you do the same for a teammate, I’m happy.

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

From “mate” to manager to rival

More than a decade has passed since those early days in north London. Thirteen years separate them in age, but back then Arteta and Bellerín were just teammates. Real mates, too. They shared a dressing room, a language, a culture. Later, they shared something more complicated: a power shift.

Arteta became Arsenal’s manager. Bellerín became his player.

“Our relationship going from teammates to coach and player was strange,” Bellerín admits. “I’m not sure we knew how to manage the transition.” There were awkward moments, adjustments on both sides. Yet that shared past meant they could always sit down and speak honestly.

On Wednesday in Dublin, they will meet again. This time as opponents. Arsenal, newly crowned Premier League champions, against Real Betis in a pre-season friendly at the Aviva Stadium. It is not the Emirates, and it is only July, but for Bellerín it means more than a routine warm‑up game.

He has never faced Arsenal before. The only previous chance came during a loan spell at Sporting, when a knee injury – so precisely timed that he still wonders if the problem was partly in his head – ruled him out. Now, at 31, he finally stands on the other side.

“I have an incredible feeling of love for the club,” he says, and there is no need to dress the words. They land as they are: raw, uncomplicated, sincere.

London, the Oyster card and a new self

To understand that love, you have to go back to a teenager from Barcelona stepping into a different world. Bellerín arrived at Arsenal at 16 and lodged with the Twitching family in Enfield, on the Ridgeway: Donna, John, and their children, Tia and Ben. Jon Toral, his friend since they were eight, joined him.

“Roast dinner was a tradition,” Bellerín remembers, laughing. “I didn’t understand that on Sunday you only ate once and then leftovers.” Years later, on a trip back to London, he went searching for a Sunday roast in a pub in Kentish Town. By then, of course, it was vegan. His life had changed. So had he.

The first thing Liam Brady, Arsenal’s academy director, handed to Bellerín and Toral was not a ball or a rulebook. It was an Oyster card. Independence, in plastic form.

They were on €400 a month. Toral would plant himself in front of Sky Sports: football, then darts, then snooker. Bellerín asked Donna where he could go and started exploring – Camden, Covent Garden, Brixton to play pool. They caught two buses and the tube to training. They were not smothered. They were not abandoned. They were growing up.

“London gave me that space where I could explore my world, mature,” he says. “There are places that could constrain you, but London was somewhere I could expand, explore life.”

Over 12 years, he lived all over the city and beyond. During the pandemic he moved to a 17th‑century farm in St Albans, reached only by a sand track. A Premier League right-back driving down a dirt road every day, retreating into a pocket of countryside as the world locked down.

At Arsenal, he became more than a footballer. Or perhaps he discovered what kind of footballer – and person – he wanted to be.

“I became a footballer there,” he says. “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 him that. So did Arsenal.

Patterns, language and a mind like a map

When Arteta returned to Arsenal as manager, Bellerín was there for the turbulence of that first year. He was there for the turning point too: the FA Cup win that gave a fragile project its first piece of evidence.

“I would have loved to have been to the title‑winning parade, but we still had games here,” he says of Betis. Even from Seville, though, he felt the catharsis when Arsenal finally lifted the league title. “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 speaks regularly with Bukayo Saka, Ben White, old coaches and staff. “It still feels like family for me,” he says. The bond is not nostalgia; it’s living tissue.

He talks, too, about the small group that always believed this would come: himself, Arteta, Nacho Monreal, Santi Cazorla. “We were the group with Mikel,” he says. “We knew that with Mikel one day Arsenal would win the league.”

On the training pitch, Arteta would ask him: “What did you do at Barcelona? I would do this …” Always probing, always searching for details, for patterns. Later, as his coach, Arteta’s influence on Bellerín became profound.

“I was with him a year and a half 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.”

That language changed Bellerín. He no longer played like the 19‑year‑old full-back who had burst into the Arsenal side. He saw different angles, different responsibilities. How to help a teammate. How to create advantages in his space. How to read the game, not just run through it.

“I’d go so far as to say that he has put extra years on my career,” he says. “Bloody hell, I owe Mikel so much.”

The goodbye that had to come

And yet, for all that connection, they reached a point where staying no longer made sense. The break was not about one argument or one decision. It was something more elusive.

“There’s not a specific reason,” Bellerín says, weighing his words. “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.”

The conversations with Arteta stretched over a year. Not a dramatic showdown, but a slow realisation. They managed the exit “in the most amicable way”, he says. Still, it hurt.

“When you leave a club like Arsenal, it’s scary, eh. Scary. It hurts, mate,” he says. “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, in a way, himself again.

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 is closer to his roots, closer to Barcelona in climate and rhythm, but with its own fierce identity. For Bellerín, it has been a refuge and a canvas.

He cycles to training. He takes writing classes. He designs clothes. He lives as a vegan and throws himself into environmental activism. He talks about toxic masculinity, about greed, about the way football can twist values. He doesn’t do it because he thinks he can change the world with a tweet. He does it because that’s who he is now, the personality built over years in London and sharpened in Seville.

Football, though, still grips him. “I’m addicted to it,” he says. It makes his blood boil at times – “football becoming the maximum exponent of greed” – and the abuse and pressure can be suffocating. Yet the game remains the core.

At Betis, he found a version of that game that made sense to him again.

“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.”

He talks about José Antonio Morante, the 19‑year‑old winger who now faces him in training every day. Just as Tomáš Rosický once pulled a young Bellerín aside and told him how to beat him in duels, he now passes on that knowledge. The Arteta lesson, lived out.

“In Seville I have found a city that embraced me, allowed my existence beyond football,” he says. That matters, especially in an industry that can swallow people whole.

A friendly that isn’t

So on Wednesday, in Dublin, a pre-season fixture carries the weight of a decade. Arsenal arrive as champions of England, their project under Arteta finally crowned. Betis arrive with a right-back who helped lay some of those foundations, who still feels part of the story.

Across the pitch, Arteta will bark instructions in that clipped, precise language Bellerín knows so well. On the touchline, he will see the man who once sat him down with a financial adviser and taught him a different kind of lesson.

There will be no guard of honour, no ceremony. Just a game in July. But for Héctor Bellerín, lining up against Arsenal for the first time, it will be something else entirely.

Not a reunion. Not a farewell. A reminder that careers move on, clubs evolve, and yet some ties never really loosen.