AIRBRUSHED FROM HISTORY
Copa 71 is a must-see documentary celebrating football trailblazers
IN August 1971, just over a year after the world marvelled at Brazilian flair in living colour in the FIFA World Cup final, more than 110,000 football fans again packed into the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City to watch the Danish national team beat Mexico by 3-0. It was broadcast live on television and had wall-to-wall media coverage. But within months, that game – the final one of a six-nation tournament – was erased from the game’s history.
The reason? It was the women’s national teams of Denmark and Mexico who contested this unofficial World Cup, along with England, France, Italy and Argentina. Just as quickly as these 100 or so players had found fame and celebrity for a month, it was snatched away from them.
‘Imagine playing in front of 100,000 people and then seeing it completely erased from history, being told that this didn’t happen to you. That was basically what these women were told,’ Rachel Ramsay points out. She is one of the directors of Copa ’71, a remarkable new documentary that tries to right that wrong and restore these trailblazing teams to their rightful place in football history.
Ramsay has done a number of films on the game before, including The End of the Storm, which chronicled the season that Liverpool ended their 30-year title drought, and This Is Football, which focuses on the geopolitical aspects of the world’s most popular sport and it was while working on the latter that she started to have questions that were answered by this project.
‘When I made This Is Football, I kept having the same questions. Yes, I can see that football is a universal language across the whole world, it crosses borders, races and class, but why were those in charge happy to exclude 50 per cent of the population in every country from playing for so long? And the answers I kept getting back were that women’s football did not progress because women didn’t want to play or they weren’t very good or that women’s football wasn’t commercial. And that myth has been percolating for a long time but I think this film, and what went on in this tournament, blasts all of that out of the water.’
Renowned soccer historian David Goldblatt points out that there was a real desire to maintain football as an exclusively masculine space for a long time. ‘Right from the beginning, there was a real energy for women’s football. By 1917, you had perhaps 100 clubs in England,’ he says at one point in the documentary.
‘The numbers are building and then doctors start publishing articles in reputable journals, saying football is dangerous for women, and for their wombs and ovaries. In 1921, the English FA says to its members that if you allow women to use your facilities, you will be banned. Other Football Associations follow suit. In Italy and Brazil, it becomes a criminal offence for women to play football.’
So, it is all the more remarkable that against this backdrop, six teams came together to play in Copa 71. The Mexican FA and FIFA pledged to ban any clubs that allowed their grounds be used for the tournament, so the games were held in the two stadiums not under their control, one of which was the Azteca.
And the Mexican public got
Standing on the shoulders of all those pioneers from 50 years ago
behind the event. Ramsay says the most extraordinary thing was when they dug into the vaults of the national library in Mexico City, they discovered reams of media coverage. Features on the teams. Player interviews. Lengthy match reports. The players themselves remembered all the games were broadcast live.
However, when she started the project and searched for some information online, Ramsay found nothing, There wasn’t even a Wikipedia entry. Copa ’71 had been airbrushed from football history.
One of the most arresting images of the film is early on when Ramsay shows Brandi Chastain, scorer of the winning penalty for US in the 1999 World Cup, footage from the 1971 final, with more than 100,000 people watching on.
At first, the two-time World Cup winner is puzzled that she had never heard of this game and then proud that so many people watched a women’s football game before suggesting that she was infuriated that it was written out of history. It is how many have felt when they have been told the story.
‘We really believe that putting this story back into history, it makes it a part and makes it very relevant to the development of women’s football today. If you take away anyone’s history or anyone’s sense of identity, it is going to be shakier. And we want to strengthen the understanding of the sport and see where the success of women’s football today and where it is coming from, and it is really standing on the shoulders of all these pioneers from over 50 years ago,’ says Ramsay.
And she hopes that Copa ’71, which is one of those football documentaries that must be watched, can be the start of a process of uncovering much of the history of the women’s game that has lain hidden or buried.
We saw it in this country last year when qualification for the first World Cup led to some gems of stories being unearthed, such as the Irish side, representing Jeyes Fluid, who toured France in 1973, playing four games.
As Ramsay says, eradicating history can lead to a loss of your sense of identity. Carol Wilson captained the England team that went to Mexico – it was the first time that all of these 15 workingclass girls, mostly from the north of England, had been on a plane.
When she returned home, she was invited to her beloved Newcastle for a dinner, which she thought would be in her honour. Chuffed, she brought her father, a lifelong Geordie fan, along to the function where the compere preceded to make fun of her and women’s football. ‘He just ripped me apart, and I was sat there with my dad. Right then, I made the decision that I was finished with football,’ she says.
And for more than 40 years, she didn’t bother with the game until the England team met up in 2017. The FA, trying to right a historical wrong, brought all the players to the Euro 2021 final, even giving them the moniker of the ‘Lost Lionesses’. And through that and the process of contributing to the documentary, Wilson has rediscovered her love for the game.
‘It is very empowering for Carol and these other women that their story was finally told,’ Ramsay explains. ‘And there are dozens and dozens of stories like this out there, and if we keep digging, we will discover more personalities to enrich the history of the game.’