FIFA considers that the first women’s World Cup was played in 1991, but 20 years earlier there were already women filling large stadiums and playing international football. The 1971 Women’s World Cup in Mexico was not an ordinary competition. It was a celebration of the talent and determination of women who defied expectations. The tournament broke an attendance record that remains today in women’s sports: The final in which Denmark beat the host team 3-0 was played before 112,500 people at the Azteca Stadium. Despite being witnessed by crowds and being one of the most notable moments in football, it was erased from sporting history, forgotten and silenced for decades. Until now. The documentary Cup 71, produced by sisters Venus and Serena Williams, brings to life the extraordinary history of the competition and its players. It premiered this Thursday on the Netflix platform in Spain and Latin America.
Between fragments of the matches, interviews with the players themselves and talks with current women’s football figures, the film portrays the resistance that the footballers faced in a sport dominated by men. They were criticized, sexualized and mocked. “Football becomes sexy”, “They make me laugh, it’s a joke”, “Now even the old women are going to be in a national team, in a World Cup, who is going to go see them?” They are some of the famous phrases that haunted the soccer players during the tournament. They just wanted to play soccer.
Cup 71 wants to change the way women’s sports history is remembered. In a conversation with EL PAÍS, the directors, Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, acknowledge that making a film about women’s football was a challenge. The documentary shows for the first time unpublished images and videos of the nine matches that were played on Mexican soil during that championship, played between six teams: Argentina, Mexico, England, Italy, France and Denmark.
The material was not easy to find, as it was archived in a library in Mexico City: “The biggest challenge was finding general information about the tournament, contrary to what happens with men’s competitions, where you find videos of even the first world championships.” on YouTube,” Ramsay claims. “Many of them, who filled stadiums, had never seen themselves play on video until we invited them to the premiere of the documentary. That must have been quite an emotional journey,” completes Erskine.
Nor did Ramsey or Erskine know of the existence of that World Cup. They say that they found out about the tournament during the Covid pandemic by listening to one of the England players on the radio, but there were no records on the internet about it. “There wasn’t even a Wikipedia page. He had completely fallen out of history. “How could something so big disappear?” they point out.
🇬🇧 Cup 71 (2023)
Told by the pioneering women who participated in it, this is the exciting story of the first Women’s World Cup in 1971. An event that had been forgotten in the history of sport, until today.https://t.co/tvXkZAwvGj
— Netflix Spain News (@netflixnovedad) May 16, 2024
In the making of the documentary they found an answer to that question: the forgetting of the tournament was the product of something planned and not a coincidence. “That men’s sports developed faster than women’s sports was not inevitable, but has always been a decision. Men’s football has always had a better stage, a better schedule and better coverage,” says the Briton. “If you look at the official history of FIFA, it seems that women’s football was invented in the nineties,” continues Ramsay, “however, we believed it was relevant to show that, decades ago, in the seventies, football played by women was already “was capable of filling large stages and competing at the highest level among teams from all over the world,” concludes the director who makes her debut in this role with Cup 71.
The matches themselves had enough drama for their own movie. The footage shows high-quality competitive matches, evidence that this was not simply an exhibition game, as well as accusations of match-fixing. A massive fight that took place between players in the semifinal between Mexico and Italy triggered a bad feeling that lasts to this day. There were also some excellent individual performances: Denmark won the final thanks to a hat trick by Susanne Augustesen, 15 years old.
The history of that world cup
In 1970, a year ago, Italy and Brazil competed in the men’s World Cup final, which was broadcast in color for the first time in history. And just 15 months later, the same venue, the Azteca Stadium, once again gathered 100,000 souls for another World Cup. But this time, Pelé was a woman: Alicia Vargas. A Mexican player whom the Italian press of the time nicknamed in honor of the Brazilian, for her technique, speed and control of the ball. Later she, along with two of her teammates, would enter the international soccer hall of fame and she would be recognized as the third best CONCACAF soccer player of the 20th century. This was one of the few official recognitions given to forgotten players.
Vargas was accompanied by a young Mexican team where almost all of them were teenagers. And similar was the case of its rivals. But while they were called to dream, the men behind the organization saw an opportunity. They were not easy years for the host country, since the echo of the 1968 student massacres in Tlatelolco, and the Halconazo of June 1971, could still be heard. The Mexican Government sought to show the world that it was a country that was making its debut in modernity and in the development. And he tried it with sport: in a period of four years, an Olympic Games and two soccer World Cups were organized.
Inspired by the success of the men’s World Cup the previous year, Mexican businessmen were the ones who invited foreign teams and managed to repeat a world meeting like the one in 1970 in Italy. They asked FIFA to endorse the event and the highest authority in international football not only refused, but also threatened the Mexican federation with a possible veto if it lent its stadiums for it. But the tournament venues, the Azteca and the Jalisco Stadium, belonged to Televisa, the same company that was going to televise the matches. “Televisa was not trying to promote gender equality, it was a business. The era of spectacle football began and there was money to be made with women’s football,” says Giovanni Pérez, historian at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
The tournament was similar to the men’s World Cups of the time: sponsorships, television coverage, merchandise and crowds of fans cheering match after match, but with one big difference: there was no salary. The documentary shows a media attack that the Mexican team suffered one day before facing Denmark in the final. They criticized them for demanding a salary.
The player Lourdes de la Rosa, originally from Mexico City, was the youngest on her team. She tells EL PAÍS that despite playing, participating in events and recording commercials, she never got paid. She only received money that day when a Mexican businessman came to visit them and took 500 pesos (about 27 euros) from her wallet for each one. De la Rosa, who previously played soccer with shoes, went to the mall to buy a pair of tennis shoes, some pants and a Chanel No. 5 perfume. She was 17 years old at the time.
Through the personal stories of the players, the documentary demonstrates that greatness is not always measured by fame or public recognition. Fate was unfair to these women, but their strength paved the way for those who came after. They just wanted to play football, but without knowing it, they changed their story.
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