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By the time Arbeloa was promoted from Real Madrid Castilla - sitting fourth in their Primera RFEF group at the time - he had created a football identity of teams with personality and wanting to dominate.
Yet at the first team, he says he couldn't simply be himself.
As he put it: "I had to be the manager I had to be."
So his time as first-team manager at Real Madrid may be no real reference for Fulham.
At Castilla, his side was built around what he calls offensive joy - possession and pressing without the ball were the two pillars.
Arbeloa was always willing to go more direct when a match demanded it.
On paper it was a 4-3-3; in practice, one midfielder pushed on almost as a number 10, shifting the shape into a 4-2-3-1 with a clear reference point up front, and wide areas mattered enormously.
Something was non-negotiable - intensity. Arbeloa's defensive model is built on relentless pressing - this was not a team that wanted to sit back and defend its own box, whatever else changes around it.
Much of that thinking has roots in the dressing rooms he played in.
At Liverpool, Rafa Benitez left him with the example of a coach obsessed with improving individual players, constantly talking to them, constantly correcting.
Back at Real Madrid from 2009, Manuel Pellegrini showed him a coach who loved pace in the game, with the wings left free to exploit it.
From Mourinho, who took charge at the Bernabeu during his playing days there, Arbeloa points to the way he led and demanded maximum effort every day, a meticulously prepared coach whose training was built entirely around his model of play.
Carlo Ancelotti and Vicente del Bosque, the latter from his time with Spain, taught him something different again - that tactics alone aren't enough.
As Arbeloa sees it, a coach who can't manage the group is "doomed to fail" - however sharp his ideas on the pitch.
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