Rebellious Magazine
Chicago feminist magazine
April 6, 2024 marked the premiere of COPA 71, a sports documentary directed by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, at the 41st edition of the Miami Film Festival. A second screening is scheduled for April 13. If you’ve the opportunity to see it, you must. Especially if you’re into soccer, or football as it’s called elsewhere in the world, and especially women’s soccer.
COPA 71 tells the story of the Women’s World Cup competition held in 1971. You may pause, and respond that you’ve never heard of any women’s soccer team competition happening in 1971, and further, that the first FIFA Official Women’s World Cup wasn’t until 1991, a good twenty years later. And that is correct. The 1971 competition is the one FIFA didn’t want to happen at all, that they refused to acknowledge or sponsor, and afterwards, banned every single women’s soccer player, across six countries, that participated in it. Memory-holed.
As you might guess, FIFA does not come out well in this documentary. And there is absolutely no reason that they should.
As a historian in the film explains, women came into the 20th Century playing soccer; there were numerous clubs. Then some bad gender-specific science was cooked up that put a stop to it, which actually led to laws banning women from playing soccer in some countries–including in the U.K., where this film was produced. The ban was lifted there in time for the U.K. to have a national women’s soccer team that played in the 1971 event.
(Wikipedia is your friend. The article on Women’s association football discusses the decades-long bans on women’s soccer play throughout the mid-20th Century. The 1971 Women’s World Cup was organized by the Federation of Independent European Female Football/FIEFF and you can read about their international events held even before this one, the 1969 European Competition for Women’s Football and the 1970 Women’s World Cup.)
To make their documentary, co-directors Ramsay and Erskine spoke with surviving members of the U.K. women’s soccer team, and then traveled to speak with surviving members of the women’s soccer teams from the five other countries–Argentina, France, Mexico, Denmark, and Italy.
Footage does survive of most of the matches, and highlights are shown in the film. News headlines and photographs fill in any blanks. Chiefly though, the press coverage reveals what a roaring success this competition was! Held in Mexico, in August through September of 1971, the athletes were celebrated the minute their airplanes touched the ground. The various teams were shown arriving at the airport, traveling to the hotels, touring the city, having dinner at local restaurants, and partying around town. Individual players were profiled and interviewed. And the event even had a cartoon mascot, Xochitl, named after a warrior goddess of lore.
Maybe FIFA deemed the event unofficial, but the 1971 Women’s World Cup carried all of the pageantry and celebration of the Men’s World Cup held there in Mexico the year before. Both the opening and closing matches were held in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium, which brought in, respectively, audiences of 100,000 and 110,000 people.
Where this documentary most shines is in showing these former women athletes, from various countries and speaking in different languages, describing and reliving the matches themselves. Their eyes shine in remembering their team and individual triumphs, in excitedly reporting goals scored as well as point chances missed or snatched away by their competition, and some still stand on a certain team playing dirty in one of the matches.
The few weeks of the 1971 Women’s World Cup was today’s soccer in microcosm. Play was even disrupted at one point over a question if the players were being fairly compensated.
Overall, the athletes played some vividly great, physical soccer matches in a wildly popular, successful tournament. By all demonstrable measures, it should have been the start of something. It makes it all the more infuriating that FIFA instead shut it all down. And made it vanish like it never happened, simply because it wasn’t under their control.
To add insult to injury, in the U.K., the captain of the women’s team was invited to a dinner by the men’s football league. Because surely they wanted to celebrate the women’s soccer team–? Certainly they didn’t invite her to put her on stage where they could insult her and the team to her face as some kind of misogynistic entertainment…
COPA 71 has a team of producers, which includes American professional tennis legends, sisters Venus and Serena Williams. The film includes, briefly, narration from Serena herself, in which she asks and answers why this all happened the way that it did. “Because they were women.”
American distributor Greenwich Entertainment has secured more viewing opportunities for COPA 71 at film festivals all over the country in the next few months, so see if it’s playing anytime near you. In Chicago, COPA 71 plays May 3, 2024, at 5:30 p.m. at the Davis Theater, as part of the Doc10 Film Festival.
Valerie Hawkins has the same last name as the editor only because they have the same mother and father. She tweets under the handle @RebelliousVal, but it's under @Valsadie that she has appeared in books… More by Valerie Hawkins
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