We are still dreaming Bend It Like Beckham Twenty-one years after the release of an iconic movie, Becks' cultural impact hasn't faded away yet

The iconic Bend It Like Beckham was released more than twenty years ago. Beckham, on the other hand, the documentary in which the former footballer recounts the ups and downs of his life, has only been available on Netflix for a few days, but immediately became one of the most watched products of the moment, confirming how big Beckham's cultural influence on sport and pop culture still is. The Gurinder Chadha directed film exploited the football talent's name for two main reasons. The first was to provide a kind of snapshot of the time when the fan base around the athlete had already reached disproportionate proportions. Secondly, David's name was used in a catchy way, as a kind of bait to draw the viewers' attention to other subjects.

So do we really still dream of David Beckham? Never more so than today. If David was the salvation of Jessminder's life, so it was for so many young people approaching football at the time. A world that has changed radically in the intervening years and changed the protagonists in the process. If at the beginning of the millennium the figure of Beckham was shrouded in a mythological aura that could only be approached by learning to pass the ball flush with the hoop, twenty years later it is the footballer himself who displays all his strengths and weaknesses. The flesh-and-blood figure of Beckham also represents these twenty years in which the history of football and its protagonists has lost some of its machismo and elitist veil - a process in which Beckham has participated throughout his career by imposing a new model of the footballer.

Two decades after Gurinder Chadha's film, young female footballers no longer need to find a role model in men to pursue their passion. They can imagine a professional career by dreaming instead of the many successful female footballers and their example of emancipation. Like Brandi Chastain, who was the role model for the character played by Keira Knightley, whose sports bra became the symbol of a revolution.