The team was waiting worriedly for me as I stepped into the impeccable strategy room in our hyper-train. A wave of sadness, mingled with nostalgia and pride brought tears to my eyes and I made no attempts to hide them. Over the last few years the team had learnt to accept my changeable moods, probably more than I myself have been able to. Maybe my derelict old age, and my consistent refusal of any life-extension therapies, and willingness to suffer physical pain and discomfort, made me too much of a curiosity, a relic. Quite a few of these players were not even born when I first took on the role of the first team manager from Mikel. Whenever I think of Mikel, my thoughts immediately get drawn towards the memories of the man who was boss to both of us, and I still have trouble fully realizing how singularly, extraordinarily, trend-breakingly unique we are. After Ars\u00e8ne had left there was consensus among everyone in the footballing world that there never, ever was going to be a manager who could serve a top-level team for such a long time. Little did they know!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I walked around the compartment for a while without saying anything. The upholstery made from cactus leather, the polyfoam chairs made from reprocessed plastic wastes in ocean, the red-and-white interior walls, the 3-D simulation zone \u2013 the realization that this would be the last time I would ever see any of these broke my heart. I couldn\u2019t speak a word, just nodded towards Bukayo to take over. Unlike me he was in perfect shape, had replaced almost all his organs in the last ten years and had gone through multiple gene therapies. He would be able to carry this team forward for decades to come. That had been such a reassuring thought, but right at that moment I was overcome with a helpless sense of jealousy as I imagined Bukayo, nimble as ever, training with the team, pacing the touchlines all through the match like a graceful jaguar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While my jaguar friend, my ageless assistant, was walking the team through 10 minutes of time-sliced simulations of the likeliest configurations in the match, the train had started moving. This 2500 Km journey would take our train around three hours through the hyperloop tunnel. Last year in an interview I was asked, that after eleven years of first team football with Arsenal, followed by four years with Barcelona, more than twenty years at the forefront of environmentalist movements, and back again in football as Arsenal\u2019s longest-serving manager, which of my life\u2019s work I cherished most? I didn\u2019t hesitate to answer that all of us who had participated in the global movement that pushed to pass the law banning all forms of fossil fuels forever couldn\u2019t possibly think of anything else. But in my own private world I must admit that this train \u2013 our very own Chapman Express \u2013 was as dear to me as any of the things that others think I have achieved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The idea for this train was not really mine, but Matheiu\u2019s. After his Levulinic acid-based oil alternatives won the market all over, he was quick to invest his money back in the club that always retained a special place in his heart: Arsenal. After buying out the American owners, he brought in experts from various fields as advisors to different aspects of running the club. Elon was one of them, and in his typical manner he pushed us to become the first football club to own and operate their own hyperloop train. Mathieu enthusiastically went with it, sponsoring the whole effort, giving me the chance to design the interiors. I am still very much grateful to him for that opportunity. Other than us, there are only five other clubs that have their own train and none of them \u2013 if I may say so \u2013 come even close to the combination of efficiency, comfort and aesthetics that the Chapman Express compartments have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The navigation map showed we already left the French tunnels and were looping through Bay of Biscay. Porta Delgada in Azores was still more than an hour away. This will be the 4th<\/sup> time the beautiful S\u00e3o Miguel dome will host the WCL (World Champions League) final. We had played in two of them, and unfortunately lost both. But the S\u00e3o Miguel dome remains my favorite, closely followed by the serene Tuvalu dome. We won our final there three years back. It is a much longer journey though, and unfortunately no hyperloop tunnel is yet ready, so we needed to fly there. But even in a Concorde it was a long flight, and nowhere as comfortable as these rides in Chapman Express. The rest of the seven such mega-dome footballing venues around the world \u2013 all in places where man-made islands were built to emerge above the risen sea water \u2013 I had never felt close to, even though the architecture of the Maldives dome with its organic lines and a slowly pulsating interior always reminded me of the city of my childhood. And it was the club of my childhood we would be playing against today in the final. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bukayo was re-simulating the last ten minutes of the fourth quarter of the play, from 110-120 minutes. This is where we had often fallen out in recent years, our third array of substitutes never being able to pick up the breathless tempo. It had been a complete enigma to me, as they come to field with fully fresh legs and should be fine, but never could seem to move the ball fast enough and lose out in the transitions in counter-counter-press. I had given up on this and asked Bukayo to figure it out. He is still so incredulously fit, and almost as impatient for the team to score goals as he was in his playing days, I suspect one of these days he might just try to bring himself in as a substitute around 100th<\/sup> minute. Pity I wouldn\u2019t be around to see that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The train started to reduce speed as the loop tunnel came above water. At this speed it was safe to activate the glass windows in the train, and I turned them on all at the same time. The bright sunlight filtered in through the transparent walls of the tunnel. We all looked at the magnificent towers of the S\u00e3o Miguel dome. I had been lost in my own reveries for much of the trip and missed most of what Bukayo and the other assistants talked about. I realized that as the train approached the stadium I would now need to summon all my emotional reserves to come up with one last rallying cry. But I had nothing left to say. The game had passed me by, I couldn\u2019t always even recognize all the players in my team, and to be honest I felt that the world too had passed me by. It seemed just yesterday I had felt myself truly alive in the middle of all the ebb and flows of technology, geopolitics, sports; throwing my life at every opportunity that came my way to move us all forward to a direction of sustainability and peace that the self-serving cynicism of the early twenty-first century couldn\u2019t even dare to imagine. I had always been optimistic. I still am, but I no longer feel I have anything left to contribute. I had stopped explaining to everyone why I had chosen not to use all the advancements of biotechnology to renew myself. As I grew older I started losing passion for the ideas through which I had always engaged with the world, and without original ideas to shape my life and without any true drive to live I just didn\u2019t see any point of carrying on. A happy hedonism was never my way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone said, \u201cBoss, it\u2019s time.\u201d It brought me back to where I was just then. I felt irresistibly tempted to tell them all that this would be my last pre-match talk, this would be the last time I would watch them, this would be the last time I would participate in any of the rituals of football\u2019s eternal bond. And I could sense the weakness of self-justification building up in me: maybe knowing that this would be my final match would inspire them more, would help them find that extra bit of magic that I had never known not to be needed in winning a final. After more than sixty years I could still remember Santi\u2019s curler in the Wembley sunshine in 2014. I was not even on the bench, but the elation of that magical moment had still retained its power in my faltering memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But I knew that would be wallowing in self-pity, and would not help the team at all. I chose my words carefully, and simply talked about Ars\u00e8ne. I talked about the Ars\u00e8ne they didn\u2019t know too much about. Before he was the great FIFA president who rid football of institutionalized corruption — who worked with world powers to create these seven football islands all over the world to help and support populations under severe threat from rising seas, who helped to create football-based education and welfare programs that today have presence in the remotest corners of the planet — he was our manager, my boss, our footballing visionary. Arsenal ran through his veins as much as football did. And he never shied from reminding us of our extraordinary privilege to play for this club, and our great responsibility to bring smiles to the face of so many, and our unique opportunities to express the greatest of human facilities \u2013 creativity, innovation, selflessness \u2013 through our profession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the teams entered the ground and the young manager of FC Barcelona shook my hand reverently, I again realized what a great privilege it was to end my footballing life managing the team I love more than anything else, and against my own childhood club. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyone reading this does not need to be told about the details of the match. In one of the most exhilarating finals in the history of World Champions League Arsenal won 5-4 against Barcelona with an iconic 118th<\/sup> minute goal that I knew Bukayo had been training the team for: 32 passes, two elaborate decoy runs down the flank, and a trademark right foot finish from our peerless no. 9 Alexandre Aubameyang, who had by now broken all the records set for us by his great grandfather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I am finishing this last chapter of my book the day after the final, I can\u2019t recall a single moment of the trophy celebrations that followed after the game. But looking at all the media while getting ready to disappear forever, I see myself in all the footage: laughing, crying, being thrown up in the air by the players, even breaking my own rules of not drinking and sipping from a bottle of champagne, throwing arms in the air with Bukayo and all the other assistants. I am surprised how it doesn\u2019t really feel that strange to see myself doing things I don\u2019t remember having done. And I feel no pang of remorse or nostalgia, no hunger for one more adrenaline ride of a season, no cravings for the next trophy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I feel ready. To lose myself in obscurity. To not have to be. Free. __________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Editor\u2019s note: The above are excerpts from Hector Bellerin\u2019s soon-to-be-published autobiography \u201cA Life in Red and White\u201d, reproduced here with the approval of Arsenal Football Club, the book\u2019s copyright owner, per Mr. Bellerin\u2019s direction. Mr. Bellerin\u2019s disappearance the day after Arsenal\u2019s magnificent triumph in 2079 World Champions League final remains an act as enigmatic as the man himself. Arsenal\u2019s most successful manager and the spiritual heir to Ars\u00e8ne Wenger and Mikel Arteta started his career as an outspoken activist, but after becoming Arsenal\u2019s manager he became famously inscrutable and enigmatic. We wish Mr. Bellerin, wherever he might be, everything that he was looking for. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The team was waiting worriedly for me as I stepped into the impeccable strategy room in our hyper-train. A wave of sadness, mingled with nostalgia and pride brought tears to my eyes and I made no attempts to hide them. 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