Héctor Bellerín’s journey: could footballers save the planet?
By Freddie Daley
This chapter was originally published in ‘Sporting Tales: 21 new stories for a troubled world'.
As societies face up to the realities of a warming world, there is a simmering sense that our past experiences are by no means a guide for our future. Uncertainties abound. And a compelling vision of the future - whatever shape it might arrive in - is acutely lacking. What’s clear, though, is that the impacts of climate change will increasingly shape our lives in unpredictable and unforeseen ways, pulling at the fabric of communities and economies.
Who will help us navigate this future? And how will we get there? The hope of elected politicians filling this role is, quite frankly, for the birds. The policy target that pervades Western democracies is one of ‘net zero’, whereby its comforts, consumption patterns and privileges are sustained through electrification. Climate breakdown is a technological problem with technological solutions.
This future looks much like the present. There are, of course, a couple of minor adjustments and slight inconveniences, but we will probably not notice it arriving. This is a future in which the vast majority of people will see no benefit or improvement; where current inequalities and injustices, those local and global, are re-cast in a green sheen. It is a future that is not worth fighting for, but also, because it is blind to a range of other planetary boundaries being transgressed due to the overconsumption of the wealthy, it is also unrealistic and impossible to deliver.
Filling this imaginative void and creating a compelling image of the future is an urgent endeavour. And it requires culture to sketch its contours, crystallise the stories and folklore that might underpin it, and move people emotionally and spiritually. Football, as one of the largest collective cultural phenomena on earth besides religion, has a part to play. Its gods - the women and men who can play the game at the highest levels - could be cultural cartographers, mapping a future worth fighting for.
When I think about this - which is often - I always come back to Héctor Bellerín. The Barcelona-born footballer who joined the Arsenal youth academy in 2011, aged 16. Having parted ways with the prestigious La Masia youth academy at Barcelona FC, Bellerin chose to make North London his home in a bid for regular first team football.
Before his arrival, rumours swirled. This isn’t unusual. Surrounding every football transfer there is always an incessant churn of chatter and hearsay, which sometimes verges on fantasy. But Bellerín was purported to have pace - and had apparently broken the sprint record set by Arsenal’s very own Theo Walcott. Already, he was being woven into the mythology of the club.
It didn’t take long for Bellerín to impress and, in 2013, he got the call up to the first team. Almost immediately, he carved out a role at right back and cultivated an intimidating reputation within the Premier League for his pace, positional understanding, and tackling - a desirable trinity for right-backs in the modern era of football. Off the pitch, he quickly became a celebrity. Sitting front row at London Fashion Week, there were countless collaborations with brands and fashion houses, and magazine photoshoots and interviews in which Bellerín spoke candidly about the world around him. Football was always central, but it was an anchor dropped amid a messy, chaotic and unjust world.
These public interventions - which continue to this day - offer us a rare window to explore the role of footballers and, by extension, athletes as activists and social commentators on the unfolding climate crisis. Through every interview, we got to witness Héctor reckon with himself. His privilege as a wealthy, white footballer. His positionality as an influential public figure, embedded within social networks that bridge the physical and the digital, and stretch around the globe. And his multiplicity, where his various roles - as a professional footballer, a citizen with a voice and vote, and a human being enmeshed into the web of life - gave rise to tensions that he embraced, wholeheartedly and unashamedly.
Héctor’s time in North London wasn’t all smiles and high-fashion though. Problems began to mount as he came to be relied upon extensively at right-back by his team during the 2018-2019 season and, in the absence of any rotation, his body began to protest. During the early exchanges of a London derby against Chelsea, in January 2019, Héctor pulled up and then dropped to the grass. The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his left knee had ruptured - the great fear of footballers everywhere - and he knew, instantly, that it was serious.
What followed was surgery and then a lengthy period of recovery, spanning almost nine months. This period of his life was fastidiously documented and shared online, followed by millions. Throughout these videos, Héctor laid bare the frustrations of not being able to play the game he loved and had dedicated his life to. The audience is granted glimpses of the monotony of recovery; the slow, repetitive movements, the litany of tiny setbacks, and the simmering exasperation that comes when your body fails to do what it has always done - your agency suspended because of a few millimetres of connective tissue.
Throughout this series, and the interviews he gave during this period, Héctor speaks with honesty and integrity about his struggles; the toll the injury has taken on his mental health, his subsequent battle with alcoholism, and the constant barrage of online hate he faced. These moments are deeply human and, at times, private. The audience is spared nothing: we all bear witness to the heavy pauses and the moments of introspection.
But introspection is never a one-way street. By going into yourself, you are forced to open up to the world around you and, by extension, your place in it. From the mid-2010s onwards, Héctor began to speak out prolifically and publicly on matters beyond football. Time and time again, he used his platform to draw attention to the multi-faceted and intertwined challenges facing humanity. From racial and gender equality, to the rights of refugees and the need to empower young people, there was no topic in which he held his tongue, nor an issue where he felt unprepared to offer his thoughts. His interventions were intersectionality in practice, using his platform and words to thread together shared suffering.
More frequently, though, Héctor spoke out on the intertwined climate and ecological crisis that is unfurling before our eyes. Living more sustainably has, in his own words, “always been a big thing” that is weaved through every decision he makes, a touchpoint for him to navigate daily life. He cycles to work, eats plant-based food, and frequents public transport over the supercars and SUVs favoured by his peers. Despite these individual actions, Héctor’s approach is deeply political: “we have a great opportunity every time we vote that we can make sure we create a more sustainable future”.
At the top of the men’s game, Héctor remains an anomaly. But why? Climate breakdown is not the only crisis we face. For some, like the middle-classes of the Global North, it is perhaps the most visceral - especially given the increasing frequency of its impacts. But for billions of people around the world - professional footballers included - there are more immediate threats, to themselves, their communities and their aspirations. Climate catastrophe is but another catastrophe layered on top for a deep geological record of injustice, wrongdoing, and suffering.
Black footballers continue to face racism from the stands and terraces. These players have demanded change for decades, and still racism is packaged up as a problem that they themselves must counter, rather than societal malfeasance. Female footballers at the top of the game are grossly underpaid, compete on pitches that would never make the cut in the men’s game, and are facing an epidemic of injuries due to playing in a professional game shaped by, and for, men. The experiences of these groups of players are by no means comparable, but they indicate the variety of threats footballers face that may supersede concerns over technical issues such as emissions cuts.
Speaking out too comes with risks. The relationship between professional footballers and the media has an ugly history. Héctor concedes himself that ‘cancel culture’ and an unforgiving media landscape can cause hesitancy amongst would-be athlete activists. He himself has fallen prey to tabloid newspapers decrying his stances on social issues as the meaningless posturing of ‘champagne socialists’ and being continuously told to “stick to football”, as if the game insulated you from experiencing the world around you, numbing your ability to tell which way the wind is blowing. Countless times he was labelled a ‘hypocrite’ for speaking out on the urgency of addressing the climate crisis, and the role which we can all play, on account of his wealth and celebrity.
Footballers fear the charge of hypocrisy - and with good reason. Public opinion polling in the UK emphasises a deep-rooted and persistent distaste towards hypocrites. The public discourse that often surrounds international climate conferences or inter-governmental gatherings, such as the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) and the G20 group of nations, reflects this. Antagonism is hurled towards those decision-makers and powerful members of the elite for saturating the sky with private jets in the name of protecting the environment.
But when footballers are tarred with the same brush, there is a conflation between real power and agency over the trajectory humanity charts in the decades ahead, and a softer form of power; a blend of celebrity and cultural influence, alongside leverage with brands, sporting institutions and, sometimes, policy makers (see influential British footballer, Marcus Rashford, for example). The former group defines what feasible climate action is and the guardrails of climate leadership, while the latter can only hope to raise awareness of the threats posed and normalise the actions we all need to take.
How, then, could footballers save the planet? In multiple ways. Like all of us, footballers are individuals that encounter and interact with multiple systems and are embedded in complex networks. And, like everyone else, footballers are both shaped by these systems while shaping them through their own actions and choices. But, unlike everyone else, footballers may have more ability to shape certain systems that they are part of and interact with, both as individuals and collectively. This is because footballers play many roles within and beyond sport due to the social, financial and cultural resources they hold.
Football is the world’s biggest and most watched sport. Its athletes have unique power as worshipped public figures who could rapidly normalise different ways of behaving and living. In a single pre- or post- match press conference they could create a whole new conversation, say about whether to fly or not, or consign the reputation of a malign company to the bin of history. They can compel an otherwise easily bored or distracted audience to pay attention to anything from child poverty to systemic racism. This type of power cannot be underestimated in a warming world filled with injustice.
Héctor Bellerín will continue to inspire people simply by being himself, understanding his influence and speaking-up when given the space for those that are almost always excluded. The social and political life of Héctor Bellerín, and his continued commitment to advocating for a better world for every human, should offer us all solace that there is strength in vulnerability, influence in introspection and self-reflection, and solidarity and love when we speak out against what is wrong and what is right. This is why I often think about Héctor Bellerín.