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.
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 directed by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, and executive produced by Serena Williams, Venus Williams and Alex Morgan.
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)
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