In 1971, tens of thousands of fans filled Estadio Azteca in Mexico City to watch soccer. It was two decades before the U.S. women took home the inaugural FIFA Women’s World Cup championship title after defeating Norway 2-1 but the players that fans were filling the seats to see were women.
“This is unbelievable,” says 1999 World Cup hero Brandi Chastain in the opening scene of a new documentary, ‘Copa 71’. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
If Chastain didn’t know about the tournament, it’s likely the average fan didn’t either. That’s what the new documentary hopes to change.
The film, which is out in the U.S. on Friday, tells the story of the unofficial women’s World Cup held in Mexico in 1971. The tournament featured players from six countries, drawing massive crowds to Latin America and unprecedented coverage of women’s football. Yet, all the footage from the pioneering event was lost to history… until now.
The film is as entertaining as it is infuriating. It outlines how Copa 71 came to be, retelling how those governing soccer explicitly kept women out of the world’s favorite game. While the success of the tournament is one to marvel at 53 years later, it also demonstrates how the women’s game was robbed of 20 years’ worth of potential momentum.
Filmmakers Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine spoke with The Athletic on Wednesday ahead of their film opening theatrically in New York City. The pair said they felt like “crime scene investigators,” unraveling the story of the 1971 tournament through archival footage and players’ stories.
“We had to go and dig and dig and dig,” Erskine said. “I think we had a fairly good sense for the possibility that this was a really big story, but we didn’t really know for certain that it would be possible to tell it in the 360 (degree) way that we, in the end, chose to tell it.”
The film introduces the viewer to some of the players that competed in the world championship, and carries you through their experiences in the tournament. The players tell their stories in their own words. It’s a symbolic way of giving the players back “their voices (that were) taken away from them fifty years ago,” Ramsey said.
“We never set out to give it a sort of potted history of the women’s game,” Ramsey said. “We really wanted to sort of resurrect and really feel this tournament itself, and the women’s experience of it.”
Some of the players hadn’t even shared experiences with their own families, or spoken about it since the tournament happened. This made making the film that much more gratifying, the filmmakers said.
“We’re still in contact with all of them,” Ramsay said. “A lot of them are doing their own press and stuff now as well, which is really wonderful. That’s a gratifying thing we didn’t quite expect – how much they’re able now to run with their own stories once they’ve found their voices back.”
The 1971 tournament is a remarkable feat itself just for happening. The event was organized when soccer was still considered an exclusively male sport, thanks to systemic resistance that lasted nearly half a century.
The film delves into a brief history of how, despite the popularity of women’s football in places such as England in the early 1900s, the sport was banned after doctors cited it as harmful to women’s bodies.
“Many doctors start publishing articles in very reputable journals saying football is dangerous for women,” the British sports writer David Goldblatt says in the film. “‘This is bad for women’s health and their wombs and their ovaries.’”
In 1921, the England Football Association (FA) told its members that, if women used their facilities, they would be banned and excluded from the association. Other European associations followed their lead, and some countries, such as Italy and Brazil, even made it a criminal offense for women to play soccer.
The bans in Europe would last until the 1970s, and, slowly, women’s football came out of the shadows. But the sport remained a mockery in the media, and those in charge of the game clung to soccer being a purely masculine space.
Players of the French women’s national team depart for Mexico for the 1971 tournament. (Photo by Marcel BINH / AFP via Getty Images)
Then came a few businessmen, seemingly outside global soccer’s political reach, who saw potential and began organizing their own events.
The success of the 1970 FIFA men’s World Cup in Mexico and a women’s football World Cup in Italy that same year inspired businessmen to organize the women’s tournament in 1971 that’s featured in the film. These men contacted organizers behind that 1970 tournament in Italy, known officially as the Martini & Rossi Cup or Coppa del Mondo, and, eventually, a second contest began taking shape in Mexico.
The 1971 tournament was met with resistance from football associations that would not recognize it. The tournament was not backed by FIFA, which had been hosting the men’s World Cup since 1930. Still, it went on.
In 1971, a chunk of the coverage published in many of the world’s most prominent newspapers, including The New York Times, reeked of sexist undertones. That year, The Times ran a story with the headline, “Soccer Goes Sexy South of the Border.”
Copa 71 premiered at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival and was partially released in the UK last year. In February, Greenwich Entertainment acquired the U.S. rights for the documentary, which will be released in theaters and on streaming services on Friday. The film is executive produced by Serena Williams, Venus Williams and Alex Morgan.
Ramsay and Erskine said they hope the film inspires other filmmakers to embark on a new genre of women’s sports films. “There hasn’t been the desire to say, ‘these are stories that not only should be told, that people want to watch,’” Ramsay said, “and if we’ve found this one, that means that there are many, many others, too, and we hope that it shows that these kinds of films can be made.”
While Copa 71 is an important step in retelling the forgotten history of global women’s soccer, there is still so much more history of the women’s game waiting to be told. Every team featured in the tournament hails from countries with their own histories ripe for retelling — as in England, where the first official national team match was recorded in 1972. Or Argentina, where the women’s national team didn’t play its first official game until 1993.
The storylines are endless, and can provide necessary context to understanding where the women’s game stands today, and why progress may have taken so long in certain nations.
Copa 71 was essentially erased from history for decades. (Photo provided by Greenwich Entertainment)
If sports are a microcosm of society, then Copa 71 represents what history often does to women’s accomplishments. While images of Pelé being carried around Azteca after lifting the World Cup trophy in 1970 are seared into soccer’s greatest memories, scenes from the women’s tournament played on the same pitch the next year were forgotten. It took another two decades before images of women, like Chastain’s iconic celebration inside a packed Rose Bowl during USA’s 1999 World Cup win, seeped into our consciousness.
While critics may balk at Copa 71 being called a World Cup at all, there is no denying the impact it had on the first official FIFA women’s World Cup played two decades later.
FIFA’s interest in eventually hosting their own women’s World Cup started to blossom around April 1972. “After years of regarding women soccer players as something of a joke, the world’s exclusively male official soccer organizations are now prepared to take them seriously,” said an article from Reuters at the time.
“The move toward official recognition of women players has been spurred by the growing number of women’s teams and by the organization of unofficial women’s world championships over the last two years in Italy and Mexico.”
(Photos: Greenwich Entertainment)
