Gail Emms once gave a school presentation about her mother, Janice, who represented England at the 1971 World Cup in Mexico. The problem was that no one believed her. The idea that 19-year-old Janice Emms had played in front of 90,000 people at Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium, that she was staying in the same hotel as Bobby Moore’s 1970 team, that her team needed police escorts to deal with their overwhelming celebrity to go was dismissed as fantasy. There was no such thing as a Women’s World Cup. Pictures or it didn’t happen.
Gail Emms would go on to become a world badminton champion and Olympic silver medalist – and even then, she still struggled to convince people of her mother’s achievements. “I’ve been yelling about Mexico for years,” Emms says. “But my mother and her teammates stopped talking about it because people thought they were crazy. You couldn’t Google it then.”
This month, the evidence they were missing is finally revealed, in all its cheerful colors and raucous crowd noise. Copa 71, a documentary that tells the story of the groundbreaking tournament through the players involved, is packed with match footage never before seen outside Mexico. For Emms it was the first chance to see her mother in an England shirt – “oh my God, there she is, center front, aiming for goal!” – and for football it represents the recovery of one of the greatest lost moments in the history of the sport.
Despite all the records broken at last year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup, the unofficial tournament held 52 years earlier remains the most attended tournament in the sport, something Carrie Dunn – whose book, Not suitable for womendescribes the history of women’s football in England – would like to highlight.
“After the Champions League semi-final in Barcelona, some pundits tweeted that it was ‘the biggest ever attendance at a women’s football match’, but that’s really not the case,” says Dunn. “People look at women’s football and think nothing happened before the 1991 World Cup final with Brandi Chastain, but we are still trying to help them understand that there is a long, fascinating and important history, full of trailblazing women whose stories are hidden stayed. .”
The 1971 Women’s World Cup was part miracle, part powder keg. At the time, the best female footballers could hope for was to be ignored, rather than ridiculed and abused. The FA had only that year lifted a 50-year ban that had banned female players from all its grounds and facilities. Many countries still copied England’s exclusionary behavior, and in Brazil it was technically illegal, under martial law, for a woman to kick a ball.
Yet a group of TV executives saw an opportunity in this unpromising environment. An international tournament held in Italy last year had alerted them to the commercial potential of organizing an event that – according to their own publicity – combined the two greatest loves of every man: football and women. Over three weeks in August and September, their World Cup would bring together five qualifying teams from England, Argentina, Italy, France and Denmark with hosts Mexico. A well-oiled hype machine flooded the press with stories and sold chairs with gimmicks that were as popular – pink goalposts, pop-up beauty parlors – as they were clichéd.
One scene inside Copa 71, whose co-producers are Serena and Venus Williams, shows how successful the event marketing was: the England team, mostly teenagers, step off their plane in a catastrophe of flashbulbs, wondering who is on their flight (spoiler alert : it’s them). The documentary highlights the heartbreaking disparity between the way the players were celebrated at the time, both on the field and on Mexican TV chat shows, and the vitriolic response to their efforts when they return home. One reason why the England team rarely spoke about their achievements was that the FA immediately issued a ban from playing in an ‘unsanctioned’ tournament. “Certainly, the young people felt like they had done something very bad,” says Dunn. “They haven’t even talked about it among themselves.”
In 2019, that team was reunited by the BBC The one show and called the “Lost Lionesses”. Their story is heartwarming – decades after falling out of touch, they now have a busy WhatsApp group sharing memories and more – but it’s just one facet of a fascinating tournament that has seen unreliable referees, pay disputes, player strikes and on-field violence combined. While England deservedly bowed out in the group stages – losing 4-1 and 4-0 to the significantly better-skilled teams from Argentina and Mexico – the knockout stages provided one of the most sensational and scandalous World Cup dramas of all time.
In the second semi-final, all eyes were on Elena Schiavo, a 23-year-old Italian midfielder with a devastating right foot and an even more destructive temper. Mexico were leading 2-1 when Schiavo scored from a magical free-kick some ten yards to the right of the penalty area – a goal that was immediately disallowed by the referee. It was in fact the second Italian goal disallowed by the referee, and the result was explosive, with angry arguments leading to a brawl in the middle of the pitch.
“If there had been more female football journalists, damn good people would have retold that story,” says David Goldblatt, author of The ball is round: a global history of football and the only male voice Copa 71. “The football world really missed a trick there. At another time, in another place, Schiavo would have a worldwide following.” With her drill eye and her ‘don’t mess with me’ attitude, Goldblatt thinks she could have been a proto-Roy Keane.
He believes a renewed understanding and appreciation of moments like this is crucial for women’s football. “Football is the only popular space I know where people sing ‘Shit club, no history’. Every match played today gains its meaning, at least in part, from its place in a longer story, and that is missing in women’s football. A lot happened between the Dick Kerr Ladies in the First World War and the 1991 World Cup, but no one told those stories, and some are epic and mythical.
“Women’s football hasn’t been very well documented until the last few years,” Dunn agrees. “It was difficult to put these pieces together – you had no official tournaments or professional leagues, or records that were kept in a systematic way. There is often the idea that all the paperwork is in a box somewhere, but no one knows exactly where that box is.”
The documentary’s themes of power, control, misogynistic officialdom and commercial opportunism also resonate strongly in the wake of last year’s World Cup – and at a time when women’s football is attracting more investment than ever before. “It just proves that football fever has been simmering among the world’s female population for the past 120 years like lava beneath the Earth’s crust,” says Goldblatt. “If there was any chance, it was there waiting to explode. Isn’t it great that we’re finally here?”
For the players themselves, the re-emergence of archive footage from the 1971 World Cup has filled in their own personal gaps – Paula Rayner (now Milnes), for example, had completely forgotten about scoring against Argentina in England’s first match. And while their experience was thoroughly fantastic, the documentary allows them to share it with an audience who might otherwise never have thought it possible.
Emms – whose mother inspired her own sports career – appreciates the opportunity for the generations who followed in their footsteps to say thank you.
“They went to Mexico, challenged everyone and stuck two fingers at FIFA,” she says. “And it is very nice to celebrate that. It wasn’t a dream, it was real.”