Hello Reader!

With the World Cup in full swing, I’ve been thinking a lot about sports stories and why they make for such great storytelling lessons. You don’t have to be a sports person to be able to appreciate a good sports story.

In real life, I understand the basics of football (soccer), but I don’t follow closely enough to know who's favored or which matches I should be watching. I recently learned at a PowerPoint party the importance of the number 10 and I will be tucking this little bit of trivia into the folds of my brain for a rainy day.

Even without deep knowledge of the game, I inevitably get swept up in the stories. The underdogs. The upsets. The unlikely comebacks. It turns out, you don't have to understand the game to understand what you're rooting for.

Now seems like the perfect time to revisit Bend It Like Beckham, a movie I haven’t seen since it came out in 2002.

If you've been here since the beginning of Saturday Stories, you might remember the lesson from Monsters, Inc. and how a great opening scene lays the foundation for everything that follows.

Bend It Like Beckham adds another layer.

In Bend It Like Beckham, the opening scene quickly sets the stage and tells us what, not who, to root for.

Within the opening minutes, we know almost everything we need to know about Jess. We know what she loves. We know what's expected of her. And we learn those two things are in direct opposition to each other. Perhaps most importantly, we know the outcome we're rooting for—we want Jess to stop hiding and choose the life that's true to her.

From there, every scene builds tension around the central question: Will Jess continue trying to be the version of herself everyone else expects, or will she finally have the courage to chase her dreams?

A quick setup to this scene: Jess had disappeared from her sister’s wedding for a few hours to play in a game where a talent scout would be present. Her dad and her best friend, Tony, were in on it. Tony, knowing that the talent scout had offered her a scholarship to a U.S. school, offers a proposal to Jess and her family, on the condition that she be allowed to attend any school of her choosing first. Jess jumps up to admit that this is a fake proposal, and she would rather be honest:

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When Jess acknowledges her truth, she's not giving the audience new information. We already knew football was the most important thing in her life.

What changes in this moment is that Jess finally says it out loud, and the feeling that comes up for the audience at this moment is relief. We’ve been holding out for this moment since the beginning of the story. Now, we're watching Jess catch up to the truth we've known all along.

This is where the promise made in the opening scene is kept.

Try this

The next time you're crafting a story, don't just ask whether your opening grabs attention.

Ask yourself:

By the end of my opening, does my audience know what they're rooting for?

If the answer is no, go back and look for the moment where you can make that emotional promise sooner. Your ending shouldn't have to tell your audience what they were rooting for. It should fulfill the hope you planted from the very beginning.

Until next week,

Note: If you want to watch the whole movie to have a little more context, it’s currently streaming on Hulu, Disney+, or HBO Max, which I think are all part of the same conglomerate these days. I can’t keep up.