The Times Magazine 17is ready for that yet. I’m having conversations
with Gay Gooners, and sometimes they go to
an Arsenal pub and they’ll have issues with
other Arsenal fans because they’re wearing a
Gay Gooners scarf or something. Which, to
me, is crazy. We’re part of the same family.”
I wonder if it all gets a little exhausting – all
this caring, all this learning and all these deep,
meaningful conversations – but Bellerín seems
pretty inexhaustible. Maybe it’s his youth. I ask
if he talks politics in the Arsenal changing room.
“I do sometimes. And I feel like the
annoying friend. Now, for example, everyone
has a mask with our [shirt] number. And
sometimes players forget it, and they wear
the ones that we just throw away. I’m always
saying to them, ‘Why are you wearing this
[disposable] one? You have a mask already.
You’re gonna throw these away, it’s gonna
go into the ocean, etcetera.’ If it’s not this, it’s
something else. Like someone gets a massive
packet delivery. ‘Why did you buy so many
clothes?’ I’m the boring friend.
“At the beginning, it was hard for me to
express these things. And now they kind of
know me, and sometimes they’re like, ‘Ugh,
Héctor.’ Sometimes they listen to me though.
That’s just who I am. I can be a bit annoying, but
also, I feel a lot of the times we do these things
because we don’t have the information. And
I used to do so many things before that I don’t
do now, because I didn’t have the information.
But we have a good dressing room. They make
jokes sometimes: ‘Héctor, just shut up already.’
Deep inside, they are listening, you know.
Then after, they go home and they’re talking
to the wife – or at least I hope so.”
He tells me he lives in a small cottage
outside north London with Patel and that he
enjoys nature. I ask him if there’s any part of
him that would conform with my reductive
ideas of what a footballer is: decadent, hard-
living, hard-partying.
“I guess I’ve had it in me, for sure. I like
to have fun. When I was young, I used to
go out. Like, now, obviously, we can’t do it
[because of Covid]. But I used to live in central
London. And I used to be a kid in the city
and do everything you can imagine a 21,
22-year-old doing.”
Ah, Héctor? You’re only 25.
“Ha. Sometimes, they tell me, ‘It feels like
you’re 40.’ It’s just what I enjoy. I feel like
I’ve lived a lot already. My life in football is
so busy and so hectic, and quite straining, in
games and stuff. I just need to be somewhere
I can relax.”
We say goodbye and close our respective
laptops. Héctor Bellerín leaves me with a truly
unfamiliar emotional aftertaste: an urge to try
to be a better person. nH&M Edition by Héctor Bellerín is available
at hm.comyoung. Around ten years old, probably. My best
friend was from Senegal and his older brother
used to listen to hip-hop. In Spain we didn’t
listen to hip-hop; we just listened to Spanish
music. To me it was so crazy, all the video
clips they were making, and 50 Cent and
Eminem and Sean Paul. It was just something
so out of this world.
“My mum always used to go to the market
next to her house and I told her, ‘Mum, I just
want hoodies and big trousers, like, two sizes
bigger than myself. She didn’t want to do it
at the beginning, but one day I went with her
and we got the stuff. I used to go to school
thinking I was a rapper. Sean Paul, in a video
clip, he was wearing a golf glove only on one
hand. And I went to the bike shop and I got
a bike glove. I was wearing it to school. I gave
the other one to my friend so he could do
the same. But even younger than that, I used
to try to look good every day. One of my
teachers said to my mum, ‘He thinks he’s going
to a wedding every day.’ I always really cared.”
When Bellerín signed for Arsenal and moved
to the UK aged just 16, he fell in love with
London’s fashion scene. “I come from a small
town, so the diversity over here, how people
dress and the different subcultures that you
could see... I used to love going to Camden
Town with my family. It’s so bohemian. And
it’s so punk. All of this I had never seen before.
So many people not really caring, just wearing
what they wanted and not listening to anyone
else. I was like, yeah, I want to do the same.”
It is presumably in this same spirit, this
same determination to go his own way and
do his own thing, express himself freely, that
Bellerín’s political activism evolved. I thank
him for tweeting about abortion rights and
he tells me I’m welcome. “The women in
my life – that’s my mum, my grandma or my
girlfriend – they’re so passionate about things
like this. They are such strong women, they’re
so confident. And I’ve always grown up in a
household where it’s, like, the roles were kind
of reversed. My mum was the really strong
one. And it was so cool to live in that way for
me, because I see life so differently than so
many of my male counterparts.”
You have a female perspective?
“For sure. I think having a feminine side
as a man is always so important in order to be
happy. We’ve been living for the past decades
with this standard that the man should do this
and the woman should do that. And that’s not
real. If you want happiness, as a man or in a
relationship, these things don’t work the way
they used to work.”
I’m not sure they ever worked all that well.
“No, they never worked before. My girlfriend
is so inspirational with this stuff, very big on
abortion and women’s rights. A lot of times
she’s told me, ‘Read this,’ or, ‘What do you
think about this?’ I saw her being so loud with
it in her social media. And I was like, of course
I want to support her. It makes a difference to
her and makes a difference to other women,
and gets other men also talking about it.”
Bellerín is also active in LGBT issues. He
works with Gay Gooners, Arsenal’s group
for LGBT supporters, and Rainbow Laces,
Stonewall’s consciousness-raising movement for
gayness within the game. It seems staggering
to me, I say, that no Premier League player is
openly gay in 2021. Does he know of players
who are closeted? Is it something that’s
whispered about in the inner sanctums, the
upper echelons of football? “No, it is somehow
a taboo subject. We can have talks in the
dressing room about all this stuff, but I’ve
never heard of anyone [being gay]. No one’s
ever heard of anyone. I would say if there was
someone who knew someone, they will keep it
quiet anyway. For the sake of that person, like,
trying to protect them. I don’t know if football‘Growing up, my mum
was the really strong one...
Having a feminine side as
a man is so important’
With girlfriend
Shree Patel, London
Fashion Week, 2018