In a matter of weeks, the men’s World Cup will have gripped the nation in the way it always does, with England flags draped from windows, outside pubs and over balconies. For many of us growing up, the Saint George’s flag was a symbol of football nostalgia that brought with it the excitement of school assemblies-turned-watch parties, BBQs in the garden and white and red face paint melting off our faces.
But now, for so many Black and Brown people in England, it’s much more complicated. It’s become synonymous with exclusion, suspicion and threat. For decades, English football culture has wrestled with who gets to claim ownership of Englishness and who is left out. That’s a tension that sits at the heart of Bend It Like Beckham, decades before the nation fell in love with the Lionesses and stopped leaving women out of football conversations.
So this time around, who gets to define national football culture, on and off the pitch?
“Indian kids like her, they’re suffering from an identity crisis. They don’t know if they’re English or if they’re Indian.” That’s what Bend it Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha used to hear teachers at school say. “I was very conscious that I was negotiating two sides, so from day one I was always blending – or bending”, Chadha tells Glamour. “I created work to challenge those perceptions.”
Dave Benett/Getty Images
You’d be forgiven for thinking the inspiration for the film, which became the highest-grossing football film of all time, came from David Beckham, but it was another England player who prompted Chadha to push back against that narrow idea of British identity in the late 90s.
“I remember watching this England game… England won, and at the end of the game, Ian Wright ran onto the pitch with a Union Jack around his shoulders,” Chadha recalls. “At the time, that was an incredibly radical thing to do. Football was all about football hooligans. It was very territorial.”
Although Bend it Like Beckham is similar to so many coming-of-age films in its exploration of independence, defiance and family conflict, using football as the arena in which English and Britishness was reclaimed wasn’t accidental. “Taking the Union Jack away from the National Front like that,” Chadha says about Wright, was “incredibly striking.” “That was when I thought, ‘Okay, I can do something in the world of football’, because it’s a no-go area for us as Brown people, but also as women.”