Copa 71
Copa 71
The largest turnout registered in women’s sporting affairs of all time seeks to break this record, and it was a physical battle both within and outside the arena which you probably have never been told about. It is Copa 71, the first unofficial competition that can be referred as women’s soccer world cup. Nowadays: Directed by James Erskine and Rachel Ramsey, with executive production from tennis greats Venus and Serena Williams alongside soccer player Alex Morgan, “Copa 71” narrates the struggle of women demanding the right to play football and the ground-breaking women’s football tournament of 1971. As the name suggests, “Copa 71” features lots of the players being interviewed along with photos and films about how the tournament was created in general and what place each single woman had towards this sport.
Similar to many issues in society, while these women were young kids, soccer was considered to be for men only. One Mexican player, Silvia Zaragoza, describes the covert tendency of her childhood as she remembers how she used to play football and got beat up by her father for it because ‘this is not what girls do.’ Italian player Elena Schiavo has a battle story of beating up the boys at school who forbade her from playing with them and English hearsay n Jorge Castro says that Carol Wilson tired of “marriage, babies and cooking” joined the Air Force saying “I thought, I bet if I join Air Force, I will play football there.” There was a parallel social exclusion from the activity. The Football Association of England in 1921 also came up with a constitutional restriction on women. It was in their venue that the women were lucky to find more fields because otherwise banned 1970.
With the exception of social attitudes, there were social movements during the sixties, and female football teams started to let out that decade.
“It may have been a political gesture,” comments Elvira Aracén from Mexico. These teams had successfully made the players feel ridiculous and sexualized because of those men coming to the event as spectators. However, after the victorious local tournament of Women’s football in Italy 1970, it drove many businessmen to profit from a Women’s World Cup planned in Mexico 1971, in spite of the numerous attempts and threats from FIFA to prevent it . The act of women’s playing football was not only regarded as a taboo and therefore disgraceful in society, but was even recommended as a pathology in the arguments, such as this sport is bad for women’s breasts, womb, or health in general.
Various people did not approve of it and considered it as dirty, immoral and not worth doing but Copa 71 took pride in proceeding anyway. There were elements of poetic justice in that event: FIFA president Stanley Rous threatened Mexico toward further cups’ participation if the women would be allowed to play at the official venue. Due to this threat, Copa 71 had to be shifted to two of the biggest venues in the country. In order to achieve this and fill the 110, 000 seats akin to all else unrelenting promotions were done. In as much as “Copa 71” puts into perspective the difficulties and history of the sporting discipline and the competition, time is also given to the women to speak.
A plethora of light and dark memories coalesce to tell a complete story from fun-filled memories like buses getting broken on the roads, to strong-chinned recollection of striking for compensation. Here also comes the most shined and dark era of their history. The self-esteem and the competitive spirits do make their appearance here, in strokes of brilliant – and sometimes, of course, comic – flashes, as we see competition coming back in their system in real time and in clean form fifty odd years later, say. However, undertones of sisterhood build beneath the surface, acknowledging the shared burden they bore. These included French, Italian, Mexican, Argentinean, Danish, English and others who were roused by their love for the game and belief of their right to play it. This is indeed a riveting, drawn out, dynamic narrative of ‘Copa 71,’ who does not leave it, no matter how it sounds, a teardrop of history that cannot be just erased away, which clocked a stage to a different revolution, if not stopping it, certainly initiating it.
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- Genre: Documentary
- Country: united states
- Director: James Erskine, Rachel Ramsay
- Cast: Elvira Aracen, Janice Barton, Brandi Chastain
