Bending it like Beckham really isn't all that.
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The game of football is integral to UK culture and our sense of shared national identity, but I kind of hate that. Football itself is an exhilarating sport to watch; going to the pub with friends on the night of a major international game creates an atmosphere and a connection between all pub goers that I can’t quite describe. Even though I myself am only a recently naturalised Brit, the connection between football and freedom/acceptance, particularly in a migrant context, is undeniable. In chapter 4 of The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed speaks of the role of football, according to Trevor Phillips, as a road to integration and happiness in the face of the threat of multiculturalism. In Phillip’s view, multiculturalism “is presented as a threat to national survival” such that integration and therefore happiness are impossible simultaneously with the existence of multiculturalism as we know it since it would force people “who are “unalike” to live together” (Ahmed, 122). This notion of happiness, according to Phillip, is closely tied to football in the sense that it is a shared activity that can act as a way of building bridges, through interaction between different cultural groups, with the purpose of encouraging integration and “happy multiculturalism” (Ahmed, 122). In this context, happiness denotes loyalty to the nation since a love of football has long been “established as a national ideal” (Ahmend, 122). Ahmed argues that by equating football to loyalty to the nation, and this loyalty representing happiness, “happiness is still used as a technology of citizenship, as a way of binding migrants to a national ideal” (133). In the same vein, “citizenship provides a technology for deciding whose happiness comes first”, meaning that in order to be integrated into British society as a migrant and to achieve the happiness that the British colonial project pushed for so long, you have to swear your loyalty to the nation to be in with a chance of achieving such happiness. However, “for those who “come first”, their happiness “comes first”, which Ahmed describes as “conditional happiness” (133).
I would agree that football is central to the feeling of national identity in the UK, as well as acting as a way of building bridges between people from varying backgrounds. That is, until England miss out on the Euro 2020 finals on penalties taken by children of immigrant parents. Young players such as Marcus Rashford and Bukayo Saka received racist abuse online from fans who placed the blame for missing their penalties and losing the game, and subsequent national outrage and heartbreak, on them. Much like Jess’ story in the 2002 movie Bend It Like Beckham, which is used by Ahmed to analyse the connection between football, migrant cultures as “other”, and the freedom to be happy, the “national fantasy about football as the “playing field” which offers signs of diversity, where “whoever” scores will be cheered”, we can see that the value of a migrant in British society is solely reliant on what they can offer when they succeed in the name of the nation(135). Football is synonymous with the British identity and therefore freedom from a restrictive “other” culture, in Jess’ case, where “freedom takes form as proximity to whiteness” through the supposed liberating new relationships she forms with a white girl and white man, Jules and Joe (Ahmed, 135). When one does not integrate themselves and continue to show up in relation to their loyalty to the nation, the way that a white Western society wishes them to, in the case of Rashford and Saka they were no longer considered to be British. Instead they are seen as lousy immigrants responsible for the downfall of the nation’s happiness, and so are no longer worthy of their British citizenship and therefore are no longer worthy of happiness.