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Every few minutes, a Real Sociedad player takes a diversion through the glass-encased cafeteria of their training complex, squirrelled away in the mountains south of San Sebastian.
After a rainy weekend recovery session, a beeline to the car park exit would seem the optimal route, but Malian defender Hamari Traore and Nigerian striker Umar Sadiq are among those who burst into the room to deliver a message — the exact same message — to Kieran Tierney.
“KT! How are you, my brother?” they shout, in affected Scottish accents.
It is a term of affection the squad have borrowed from the Scottish left-back during his season-long loan from Arsenal. In this instance, they are attempting to perk him up after his “head had gone” following an injury that kept him out for the Real Madrid game at the end of last month.
Tierney is entering his final three weeks in the Basque region, having immersed himself in this part of northern Spain, whether that be learning commands to direct his winger, eating his favourite local steak dish txuleton or exploring the hills with his Rottweiler, Benjy, to watch La Real’s media officer coach his local team.
“There were so many papers just to get Benjy here,” says Tierney. “At least he’s got a European passport, so he should be sound in customs coming back.”
As the 26-year-old sits down with The Athletic, he speaks about San Sebastian with the vigour of someone who wishes he could delay the flight back to the UK.
“It’s a totally different lifestyle, but I’ve enjoyed every second of it. It’s probably been the quickest year of my career,” Tierney says.
“The last two years have been new to me, as it’s the first taste of not being first-choice. At Celtic, I played all the way. At Arsenal, I had played all the way until the last season and this year I’ve played most of the time when I’m fit but, unfortunately, I’ve had a couple of injuries.
“It’s tough but I’m not complaining one bit. Very rarely do you go through your full career and everything goes nice and smoothly for you. It’s made me learn and made me stronger.”
Tierney had options to remain in the Premier League or go to other countries but when La Real made contact last summer, his preferred destination became clear.
“I had an inkling I wanted to try something outside of England,” he says. “When this came up, it felt perfect. It’s got a proper family feel, the city is amazing and playing Champions League was massive for me.”
Kieran Tierney is due to return to Arsenal at the end of the season (Aitor Alcalde/Getty Images)
Tierney has carved a reputation as a throwback. Playing in short sleeves in the snow; using a supermarket carrier bag rather than designer leather luggage; marauding overlaps as opposed to intricate full-back inversion.
San Sebastian is all polished chic, a stunning coastline allied with the most Michelin-starred restaurants per square metre of anywhere in the world. It screams luxury and glamour. Presumably the football is about being pretty, too? Not quite.
“On my first day I was like, ‘Ooft!’. I was blowing,” laughs Tierney.
“But I thought, ‘I love this, this is what it’s about’. No one was holding back, everyone was running into challenges. There was no going at 85 per cent as we’ve got a game coming up. People think about Spain and tiki-taka but this group is about winning through hard work. The training has a lot of running here. In England and Scotland, pre-season is the really tough time but here it is always intense.
“The way they compete is unbelievable. It comes from the manager. Everything is about winning your duels. If you don’t, you’ll know about it.”
It turns out La Real manager Imanol Alguacil’s values align closely with Tierney and his hometown of Motherwell, famed for its steel industry. But for all the positives, the defender has been denied a golden moment to take away from his spell in Spain.
A 4-1 aggregate loss to Paris Saint-Germain in the last 16 of the Champions League was followed by a penalty shootout defeat by Mallorca in the semi-finals of the Copa del Rey, Spain’s domestic cup competition, when his close-range shot during extra time was controversially judged to have been blocked on the line.
“They don’t have goal-line technology here, so they couldn’t tell for sure,” Tierney says. “I don’t know how accurate it is but people were sending me stuff online showing it was in.
“For a day or two, I was properly gutted — I’d have been loved here. It just wasn’t meant to be. I had to stop thinking about it, as it would eat me up.”
There can often be a perception that the wealth of top-level footballers means they are immune to emotional dips, or that it must dilute how much they care about performing on the pitch. That characterisation does not apply to Tierney.
He has played 359 games for Celtic, Arsenal, Real Sociedad and Scotland, but that number could be even higher.
Injuries have sidelined him for 122 matches in his nine seasons as a senior player, with two hamstring issues limiting Tierney to 14 starts in all competitions during this loan. More recently, a groin problem means he has just returned to training after two weeks out, ahead of Monday’s trip to Barcelona.
“I shut off for a few days from people,” says Tierney. “They’ll not get a hold of me for three or four days, until I accept the injury. That’s the hardest thing about it: accepting it.
“You’re just like…,” Tierney sighs. “One minute, looking forward to the last games and the Euros, then you’re thinking about all the big games you’ve missed. It takes me time by myself to be quiet, reflect and motivate myself to go again. Once I’ve accepted it, I’m positive again but people know not to text me about it.
“You get s**t moments in football and life, like everyone does. It’s just how you deal with it and bounce back.”
Tierney has transformed his body from the scrawny 17-year-old who burst onto the scene at Celtic, going from fourth-choice in the Glasgow club’s under-21s side to a star of the first team and helping them win four domestic trebles in succession.
The Athletic is told the numbers he posted in sprints and jumps remain the benchmark at Arsenal — a show of the powerful frame he built.
“I had to (develop),” he says. “I got my first injury at Celtic and I was about 60-something kilograms. I came back about 75kg (165lb). John Currie was the sports scientist and he said, ‘You’ve done brilliantly for a year but use this to go and get stronger’. I was doing double sessions until 6pm, and it made a real difference. I don’t need to do as much now, it’s just maintenance.”
Those setbacks, though, would leave many feeling luckless — like their body was betraying them.
“It depends how you look at it,” Tierney says. “Some people might think I’m one of the luckiest people around. I live a privileged life, so I’m blessed and grateful, but in terms of injuries, yeah.
“The hardest days (when you are out injured) are the games. It’s horrible. You’re trying to help motivate other people but you’re feeling down yourself — gutted you’re letting them down. That’s what affects me the most.
“I’ve been using a psychologist this season. They help, as a lot of people don’t know exactly how to train their brain. You train muscles, technique, tactics, but you don’t really train mindset as much. Getting tips on how to overcome situations has been really beneficial.”
It has helped Tierney adapt to his first true experience of life abroad, a vastly different one from when he left home comforts in Scotland for north London in August 2019, aged 22.
“I’d stay at the training ground as long as I could,” he remembers of those early days at Arsenal. “I’d ask people to see if they wanted to stay and do recovery, stay and do gym, stay and get a massage. Then I’d think about going home.
“I was just by myself. I would do nothing, really. I would wait for my mates to finish work and then go on the PlayStation but there was no football at that time either (during the COVID-19 lockdown).
“I wanted to train and get to know people but I was out (with a shoulder injury) and they didn’t know what kind of player I was or what type of person I was.
“I’ve still got that self-doubt. Someone said that to me: ‘You believe in yourself but you doubt yourself, so you work hard’. I look at that in a good way.”
Once he got home to Scotland for a period, he was in a better mental state. But what also helped was that Tierney’s Scotland national-team chef Johnny McCallum offered to cook fresh food for him at the start of the pandemic.
So much so that he ended up moving in alongside Tierney — despite him supporting Celtic’s arch-rivals Rangers.
“I did say, ‘That chicken is looking a bit pink, Johnny…’,” jokes Tierney.
“When a space came up at Arsenal, I said to them about Johnny and they trusted my judgment, so brought him straight in.
“He’s probably been one of their best signings in recent years! They love him, as he’s more than just a chef. He is somebody people love to be around and he brings good energy. When you’re fighting for everything and might have the odd bad day, people like him naturally cheer others up.”
Tierney has two years to go on his deal at the Emirates but with the team evolving heavily in the past two seasons, this summer feels like a crossroads that could mean he has already kicked his last ball for the club.
“There is every chance,” he said. “Look at the squad depth in that position now. They have (Oleksandr) Zinchenko, (Jurrien) Timber, (Takehiro) Tomiyasu, (Jakub) Kiwior. Four players can play there. So if I go back and it’s the same as before then I’m not silly, I know the chances are I’ll be leaving.
“But you never know in football. You get the rare case with (William) Saliba, where he came back after a couple of good seasons (out on loan) but you don’t see it too often with someone who has played for four years, left, and then come back to play again.
“Stranger things have happened. I could go back and there is a place for me. So I’m prepared for both.”
Tierney won the FA Cup in his first season in England, and in January 2021 scored a memorable solo goal against West Bromwich Albion.
It was an act of leadership during a testing time in manager Mikel Arteta’s first couple of years in charge. Arteta called him a natural leader and said he could be a captain in the future as he embodied the DNA he was looking to instil in his team.
Zinchenko was signed in summer 2022 from Manchester City and replaced Tierney, as Arteta opted to use the Ukrainian as an inverted full-back.
“There are no hard feelings or spite from me,” Tierney says. “I understand the decision of the manager to change me from No 1 to No 2. It’s football.
“It never happened in a personal way. It was tactical. He thought it was best to get Arsenal results — and he was 100 per cent correct, when you look at it. They were close to winning the league last year, and this year I think they’ll do it.
“The Arsenal fans are amazing. Whenever I post, or Sociedad post, there are still fans saying, ‘We wish you were here’. It makes me happy, as they could easily just forget about me because I’m not there anymore.”
Tierney says he understands why Arteta opted to use Zinchenko instead of him (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
When Zinchenko arrived, was Tierney explicitly told the plan had changed and that his minutes would drop as a result?
“Nah, I just kind of got the feeling,” he reflects. “At the tail-end of the season before (2021-22), it was being implemented in training a bit. So when he came, I was thinking, ‘Will he play centre-mid(field) or will he be the left-back who goes inside?’.
“In pre-season, I knew I had to get my head down and try to learn it. The first few months, it was about being inside more or higher up, it was just repetition of having the ball.
“In training, anyone can do it, but going into games you need to know exactly when to turn, when to play forward, when to bounce it back. It’s just trying it, making mistakes and learning for next time.
“For me, the best thing was watching Zinchenko do it.”
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Tierney was asked to function as an inverted full-back most of the time last season, even though the strength of his game is his ability to gallop down the line.
While Tierney has been away, Zinchenko’s injury problems and fluctuating form have left Arsenal’s left-back role up for grabs, with central defender Kiwior being deployed at times as a conventional full-back. Is there not some frustration that the system could not have been tweaked for him, an actual left-back?
“I know what you mean, as I’ve seen some of the games and Ben White was inverting, but the manager was doing what he thought was best for the team again,” Tierney says.
“Arteta believed in me to play there (inverted). He told me that and he showed me clips from training to prove I can do it. If I was asked to do it at Sociedad, I’d do it no problem, as (well as) I can, but you’re comparing me to Zinchenko. He was brought up as a centre-mid, so you’re up against it. He’s a technical genius.
“We are both completely different players: physically, technically, tactically. We’re not similar left-backs but we were doing similar jobs, which was more difficult for me than him.”
Tierney, who sent a good-luck message to the squad WhatsApp chat before departing for Spain, believes Arsenal will last the course in the title race this time due to the culture that has been created and the leadership within the group, starting with the captain, Martin Odegaard.
“He leads by example. You don’t get captains like Scott Brown at Celtic anymore. It’s just a different type of leadership,” Tierney says.
“Martin speaks in the dressing room and in the huddle but that changing room is full of leaders and people who will step up. Nobody hid last season. We’d openly say what we thought in the changing room. Last season was maybe one season too early (for Arsenal as potential champions). At that point, it was most people’s first title race in the Premier League.”
Tierney turns 27 next month, feasibly the halfway point of his senior career, and is open to anything as he contemplates the next step — something he would not have imagined until he left Celtic and moved past video-calling his mum for instructions on operating a washing machine.
“Leaving Celtic was the hardest decision I was ever going to make. After I did that, I was open to anything, trying new cultures and new leagues,” he says. “You get one career and you don’t know how short or long it is going to be, so you have to try everything and make the most of it.
“I could see myself playing in Spain or Italy. I love La Liga. It’s a great league and I’ve enjoyed this season a lot.
“I don’t want to be jumping about to loads of different places, though. I want to get used to it and adapt to it, so I can kick on.”
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(Top photo: Jordan Campbell/The Athletic)
