Politics & Power Quote by Parminder Nagra

Parminder Nagra’s line lands like a casual shrug, which is exactly why it stings: it treats the American sports hierarchy as so natural it barely needs defending. “Of course in America” is the tell. It’s a soft gatekeeping phrase that smuggles in a whole national self-image: real sports are football and baseball, everything else is a side hustle. Soccer isn’t rejected outright; it’s politely diminished into “a little niche,” the kind of cultural corner you can tolerate because it doesn’t threaten the main stage.

Then comes the sharper pivot: “that the women have kind of filled.” Nagra isn’t just describing a demographic trend; she’s exposing how American culture often processes women’s success by zoning it off. Women’s soccer becomes acceptable, even celebratory, precisely because it’s cordoned into a category men supposedly don’t want. The phrasing “kind of filled” adds a note of improvisation, as if women simply occupied an empty room rather than fought for funding, visibility, and legitimacy. It’s a neat linguistic trick that mirrors a broader one: structural exclusion reframed as organic preference.

Context matters. Nagra, forever associated with Bend It Like Beckham, speaks from the hinge point where soccer is both immigrant shorthand and feminist possibility. In the U.S., women’s soccer has been elite and popular in flashes, while men’s soccer has long carried the stigma of being insufficiently American. Her quote captures that paradox: a sport treated as “foreign” becomes “ours” only when it’s feminized, making women’s dominance feel less like triumph and more like containment.