Having last year’s Fifa Women’s World Cup played in our backyard was a remarkable thing, a joy to behold and it took only one Spanish male official to kill the feel-good factor in its aftermath. After all, co-hosting the quadrennial tournament just 32 years after the first one … [cue loud wrong-answer buzzer noise].
The 1991 Fifa event in China, as this stirring sports documentary tells us, wasn’t the first. There was an earlier one between six teams – England, Denmark, France, Mexico, Argentina and Italy, held in Mexico City and Guadalajara in 1971. Let’s not spoil it by telling you who won because the recap of the unfolding tournament is one of its chief pleasures. The film intercuts great Mexican colour television footage of the event – enhanced with re-recorded commentary, some anticipating a goal before the ball is in the back of the net – with interviews with more than a dozen players.
Now in their 60s and 70s, the players’ memories of their beginnings and how it led to those giant stadiums in Mexico more than make up for the faults and formulaic approach. They talk of how the games were often brutal, resulting in broken bones – the Mexico-Italy game was called off early due to player violence. The Mexicans effectively went on strike before a vital game, demanding to be paid what their box office appeal was worth.
It’s clearly a doco with money behind it. It’s executive-produced by Serena and Venus Williams – the former narrating the intro – and shot in six different countries. Playing Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walking over one sequence and colourising footage of English women’s football of the 1910s and 1920s before the football association banned it, can’t have come cheap.
It’s also curiously selective. There was an earlier non-Fifa women’s “Coppa del Mondo” in 1970 in Italy. It’s not mentioned here, the film presenting Copa 71 as an out-of-nowhere event, one that was a dream come true for players – only for it to do next to nothing for the cause of the women’s game because of Fifa’s sexism and intransigence. Football sociologist David Goldblatt is there to explain Fifa’s failures in a way that may remind Ted Lasso fans of journalist Trent Crimm.
It all makes for a very good, entertainingly galling case history of sports sexism. But it’s also quite the love letter to the beautiful game featuring the likes of English captain Carol Wilson, Italian skipper Elena Schiavo, Mexico’s Silvia Zaragoza, France’s Nicole Mangas and more, as the voices of a forgotten generation of football stars.
Rating out of 5: ★★★★
Copa 71 directed by James Erskine & Rachel Ramsay is in cinemas now.
