“Football, with every passing day is more about the margins, about where can we make more money, and less about the people that support it, and the people that make football truly great. It’s becoming more elitist every day,” says Hector Bellerin, with calm conviction.
“It’s definitely hard to see the game drift away from some of the reasons that made you love it. I just finished reading Fever Pitch from Nick Hornby, a book I wanted to read for a long time to see how football was for fans then, and how they lived it. And he finished writing that back in 1991, and already from then, you see a huge difference with all of these different competitions and decisions that are clearly being taken just for margins and money, you see how much it is drifting away from what it once was.”
It feels pretty telling that within the half hour we have with Bellerin, he is asked just once about what he’s doing on the pitch, rather than his actions off it, or what he thinks of the general direction of the game. It’s not that Bellerin doesn’t have a wide variety of football experiences to fill a book or two himself; Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal, winning a Copa del Rey on penalties with Real Betis, beating Arsenal with Sporting CP, being part of what looks like Xavi Hernandez’s only La Liga title. And yet everyone seems satisfied with their answers. It’s just you don’t normally get someone of his stature who is as cogent and willing to address topics that generally send press officers scuttling for safety.
Real Betis are perfectly happy to put Bellerin up. Questions that might be sharp-edged for someone else, topics often perceived as treacherous for a footballer, he navigates with sufficient ease to make you forget who he is.
Activist is a little strong, that’s a word that¡’s been doused with an element of mistrust and a sort of aggressiveness that doesn’t befit simply promoting a cause. It certainly doesn’t have a place in Bellerin’s wardrobe, which always appears tailored in fit, and curated for cool. Actually dealing with how Bellerin speaks about the climate crisis, mental health, football as a wider game, and more than anything else, people, there’s no doubt that he is actively asking for change. There’s nuance, there’s empathy, there’s perspective on issues that are regularly condensed into one two-dimensional viewpoint. Even when he gets a lot of that sort of thing back.
“They only say to footballers to ‘stick to football’ when they do something that is not masculine. When they play Playstation, when they drive fast cars, when we get drunk, there’s nothing to say about that. But when we do things, when Borja [Iglesias] painted his nails, or when I go to a fashion show, that’s when they question us. That’s when they say it affects our football.”
“It’s something to think about. And when we drift away from football, and we don’t meet that standard that so many people hold over us, it’s something that I ask myself often, and it does piss me off.”
Daily life for Bellerin means practicing what he preaches in Spain’s most religious region, Andalusia. Come shine, and it often does in Seville, he’ll be on his bike to training and around the city. Come rain, he’ll be on public transport. The 28-year-old says that he takes months to decide on buying something new, deliberating on which option is the most sustainable, if he can avoid buying another down the line, putting greener lifestyle into ‘every single decision I make’.
“I’m not the one that has the answers,” he assures though. “It needs to come from the organisations at the top, and it’s something that not only in football, can’t just fall on the clubs and the players, we can’t decide how we travel, we just go where the team manager tells us. And it has to be us as players and fans, to demand that and for them to make the resources available to make that change. It has to come from the top, but it has to be altogether, and it’s not about pointing fingers at who needs to make a change, it has to happen slowly and together, organic.”
He might not be the one with the answers, but he’s certainly asking the right questions. Bellerin seems keen to hold power to account, and his voice is certainly in use, but it’s not the norm. The aforementioned Iglesias painted his nails in support of the LGBTQIA+ community, and teammate Aitor Ruibal hit back at homophobic comments that he and Iglesias received online for wearing handbags to a wedding. When across the globe a curdling uproar cried out against former RFEF President Luis Rubiales, 80 female footballers said they wouldn’t return to Spain duty while he was there, and just one male Spanish footballer risked anything – Iglesias.
So given how much power footballers have to sanitise the image of dictatorial regimes, like an international Hollywood meets cubism facelift, why are there so few footballers willing to attach their faces to good causes?
“This is a question I ask myself all the time. Football clubs have always wanted to protect players, especially in the past. You know we’d hear, don’t talk about politics, just concentrate on your football, which I understand to a point, or with young players, but as we get older and we mature, we are all capable of expressing our views and it’s important to exercise this influence that we have, and not just football players, it can be artists or anyone who has an influence over the rest.”
“Here we have a group of players that have had difficult conversations, with our teammates, we’ve had awkward conversations between us, we’ve wanted to learn. I think that a lot of people, especially men, are sometimes scared of talking about these things, because they are scared of being called hypocrites. Maybe in the past we’ve had different opinions, because of the way we’ve been raised or educated, and people that don’t want to change are the ones that find it very easy to point the finger, and call you a hypocrite. Because you were one way a couple of years ago, you cannot be a different person now.”
Free from shame or self-important redemption, Bellerin is happy to admit that he too was a different person. His interest in fashion was not sustainable in the past. Where things get tricky is that maybe he is hinting that the world would prefer that you didn’t care about your actions, rather than you changed who you are – in itself a flawed concept, but also compatible with boxy thinking.
“The internet today is very quick to cancel people, it’s not very accepting of mistakes, and when you live in a society that does not accept mistakes, that’s one of the keys perhaps. It’d be a good thing if we were able to have those conversations even if we don’t think in the same way, that every day are getting a bit harder.”
Those awkward conversations, those changes, are something that Betis and Bellerin are specialising in. He worked with his girlfriend Elena going into schools and using football as a conduit to encourage kids to speak about their emotions. The Real Betis Foundation also work closely with Bellerin, and have over 100 initiatives, projects and programmes to their name. That goes from providing eco-friendly transport to fans travelling to games, to sustainable water usage at their facilities, to literally having Joaquin plant trees.
Where the kernel of… Maturity if you will, or maybe human intelligence fits better, where that shines through in Bellerin is in his approach to changes, to the conversation itself, regardless of the topic.
“When you try to change things too quickly, that have been done for a long time, sometimes they stop being done because it is not an organic change,” he says emphasizing that change, cannot just be grassroots, or simply imposed from above, but needs to be a collective convergence.
It feels only sensible that he should have the final words.
“One of the greener things we can do is vote. Voting is one of the things that we can do because it means that you put someone in power that is going to put those green initiatives in place, because sometimes as consumers we can feel guilty, but it’s also the state and the big companies that pollute the most, and make us feel bad, so we have a great opportunity every time we vote to put our community first.”
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