Both Fifa and the UK’s Football Association have had an awful lot to be ashamed of over the years, but hardly anything as bad as the breathtakingly spiteful, sexist and dishonest way they treated women’s football in the last century, particularly after the spectacular success of the 1971 Women’s World Cup in Mexico, an independent event defiantly held outside Fifa’s pompous auspices and discussed now in this riveting documentary.
An independent women’s football association had held its inaugural Women’s World Cup in Italy in 1970 with sponsorship from Martini vermouth. Then, a year later, they staged their ambitious Copa 71 in Mexico with fixtures in two national venues which Fifa couldn’t control: the Jalisco stadium in Guadalajara and, in Mexico City, the Azteca stadium. The capacity crowds and the euphoric atmosphere were staggering. So conditioned are we to the sexist view of football that the extraordinary archive footage of the crowds for Copa 71 feels like some alt-reality hallucination. But afterwards the FA and Fifa dedicated themselves, almost like the Men in Black waving their amnesia devices in everyone’s face, to denying its success, forgetting it ever happened, clamping down on the venues and facilities and punishing the women for their success.
