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.”
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.”
And that’s where the concept of bending came from. It was about bending the rules at home, but also inherited societal rules around race, gender and belonging.
Beckham’s name ended up in the title of the film because “He was a gay icon and he was super comfortable with challenging the masculinity of football,” Chadha explains. “Plus, he also had skills – bending the ball was an incredible skill, and Jess was bending the rules – so the metaphor worked.”
But in the same year as the film’s 20th anniversary, it was Ian Wright who was one of the BBC Sport pundits at Wembley watching on as England won the women’s European Championship for the first time. While Wright was challenging the concept of national identity in football for Chadha as a Black England player in the 90s, it was a different picture altogether in 2022. He had become the biggest supporter of the women’s game to come from men’s football, cementing himself as an outspoken ally who has championed and advocated for equality in women’s football for decades. Not even Chadha could have written that.
A year after the Lionesses’ Euros win, Wright starred in the 2023 Women’s World Cup Adidas advert alongside actor Jenna Ortega, Lionel Messi, David Beckham, and, perhaps most importantly to him, his granddaughter and Chelsea academy player Raphaella Wright-Phillips.
That theme of multi-generational sporting stories is something Chadha believes is critical to her film. And for viewers, the beauty lies in how it tackles intergenerational tension and frameworks of intersectionality head on, exploring Jesminder’s identity of a teenage girl and a daughter of Indian immigrants as well as a footballer.
“There would be no Bend it Like Beckham without Jesminder and her parents, because they were part of the struggle,” Chadha says. “The film was made in grief. My dad had just died so the film was dedicated to him. All the scenes with [Mr Bhamra] were really about how my dad had encouraged me, and protected me from the glare of community. But obviously I had to get Mr Bhamra to that place,” she says.
And getting someone “to that place” echoes the way women’s sport has had to advocate for itself, with generations of women fighting for equality, in the same way immigrants and ethnic minority communities have had to fight for basic respect and humanisation.
“What people are doing now is fighting establishments and fighting the rules in a different way.” In Bend It Like Beckham, Jesminder’s dad stopped playing cricket when he emigrated to London due to being racially abused. The older I am, the more that scene resonates with me personally. My own dad emigrated from Pakistan to Sheffield as a child, and it was football that became his way of assimilating as he progressed from the grassroots semi-professional.
The stories I heard about my dad’s experience of football growing up have undoubtedly shaped my journey as a sports journalist. Over the past decade, I’ve interviewed almost 50 footballers of South Asian heritage and spent over a year reporting on the lack of British South Asian footballers for a Sky Sports documentary I presented in 2024.
“I had to fight to tell my stories,” Chadha tells me. And fight, she did. When it was released, the film was radical in how it dismantled the idea that Britishness was fixed and white. So, what has changed?
Not as much as you’d hope if you were watching the film in 2002.
The way my Dad navigated the football world as a young immigrant was full of pride in his new English identity. He played for Sheffield FC, the oldest football club in the world. Through his coaching career, he became a community leader for players in Sheffield – especially young Pakistani boys – and later worked for Sheffield United. In the '90s, he was a keynote speaker at an English FA conference. But 30 years later, when I was interviewing the FA as part of my Sky Sports documentary, I was asking the same questions he was in the 90s. Why are there still so few British South Asian professional players?
“It’s devastating that 24 years after the film has come out, we’re kind of in the same position,” Chadha says. “I would have thought there would have been much more improvement.”
Due to systemic racism issues in football, especially the perpetuation of outdated and harmful stereotypes, only a tiny percentage of South Asian heritage players who play at the grassroots level make it to academies. There was only one British South Asian player in the women’s top flight this season.
So while things may not be improving quickly enough, at least the way football was once held as one of Britain’s most guarded cultural spaces has shifted. At least as a sports journalist in 2026, I’m able to hold the powers that be to account, rather than politely make suggestions in a keynote speech to them like my dad did. Just like Jess was able to play the sport she loved, instead of giving up on it due to racism like her dad.
The film didn’t just reflect change, it helped create it. And soon, we’ll have a Bend It Like Beckham sequel, due to be released in 2027, which Chadha announced at the 2025 Women’s Euros final in a full-circle moment.
“If you love the movie and you love the world of women’s football, you’re going to love [the sequel].”
