Copa 71 (PG)

★★★★ Add this to the list of great football documentaries. Fifa’s already tattered reputation is obliterated in James Erskine and Rachel Ramsay’s engaging film about an erased moment in women’s sporting history. ~ The Times.

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It is August 1971. Football teams from England, Argentina, Mexico, France, Denmark and Italy are gathering at Mexico City’s sun-drenched Azteca Stadium. The scale of the tournament is monumental: lavish sponsorship, extensive TV coverage, merchandise on every street corner andrecord crowds of over 100,000 hollering fans turn this historic stadium into ‘a cauldron of noise and heat’ match after match. A fawning media treat the players like rock stars. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the greatest moments in international footballing history.

But this is a tournament unlike anything that’s happened before. The players on the pitch are all women. And it’s likely you’ve never even heard of it. This is Copa 71, the unofficial Women’s World Cup. Dismissed by both FIFA and domestic football associations around the world, this event has been entirely written out of history. Until now.

Told by the pioneering women who participated in it and built from archive unseen for fifty years, this is the extraordinary story of the 1971 Women’s Football World Cup.

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★★★★★ The shameful treatment of women’s football after an unofficial tournament in Mexico in 1971 is the subject of this absorbing documentary. ~ The Guardian.