Pic: courtesy of CPH:DOX
The World Cup. 1971. Crowds numbering in excess of 100,000 in Mexico City’s iconic Azteca stadium. But you’ve never heard of it. Why? Because it was a women’s tournament, and one conveniently airbrushed out of history. Until now. “I think it’s no exaggeration to say that we have actually uncovered one of the greatest secrets in sport,” Copa 71 co-director Rachel Ramsay told the professional audience at Forum 2022.
The story is amazing. In August 1971 six teams from England, Argentina, Mexico, France, Denmark and Italy gathered in Mexico City to do battle in the World Cup. The local coverage was intense, with wall to wall TV coverage, mega sponsorship, merchandising on every street corner and enormous crowds cheering on the teams. The players were treated like deities, and each team was allocated a press attaché. But very few people knows of the tournament’s existence, nor of the footballing pioneers on whose shoulders stand the likes of latter day stars Megan Rapinoe, Tobin Heath and Lucy Bronze.
In their feature doc Copa 71, currently in development, filmmakers Rachel Ramsay (directorial debut) and James Erskine will tell this hitherto untold story and seek to overcome a half century of cultural and historical negligence. The 90-minute film, produced by Victoria Gregory of New Black Films, is budgeted at just over €1 million and supported by Dogwoof.
“I think it’s no exaggeration to say that we have actually uncovered one of the greatest secrets in sport. And if it weren’t captured on camera, many, many cameras at the time, then we would be hard pressed to believe it,” said co-director Ramsay. “Copa 71 is the story of a handful of pioneers who fought back.”
Ramsay told a brief history of women’s football that has never been widely circulated, one of early 20th Century popularity far in excess of that enjoyed by the men’s game, but then one of backlash and suppression, forcing the women’s game underground.
Which is why this story must be told, bridging, as it does, the hidden past with the contemporary women’s game (which, while vibrant and high profile, still fails to remunerate its players in line with male counterparts).
The class of ’71 were heroic, Ramsay suggests. “They refused to be told what they should and shouldn’t do, how they should and shouldn’t express themselves, how they should and shouldn’t be allowed to play physically. They kicked off a revolution and we have tracked them all down.”
“We have talked to all of the players from the original teams who played from Mexico, Argentina, Italy, Denmark, England, and France,” she adds. “These women are charismatic, irreverent. And as you can imagine, they have a lot to say and they all grew up in very different societies, but they had one thing in common. They all believed when they were growing up that they were the only girl in the world who dreamed of playing football. That was until they got to Mexico. As a global unit, they are proof that we are never alone in our dreams.”
“Contemporary voices will then spin us through the next decades, celebrating all the groundwork that these women laid to reach where we are today, where women’s football, women’s soccer is growing exponentially,” she adds.
Ramsay, who has produced numerous football-based films over past years based in UK, Germany, the US, Rwanda, Iceland, China and Brazil, further addressed the latter day myth of football as a universal language, that it supposedly “crosses borders, [that] it crosses class divides and is a beautiful lens through which to view the human condition.”
“But my question in each of these films we’ve made has always been – where are all the women. If 50% of the population aren’t included in the story, then football is not the great leveller it claims to be. And I haven’t had a satisfactory answer to that question. So that’s what set us on this journey.”
