It’s a sign of the importance of what is uncovered in the documentary Copa 71 that Serena Williams, perhaps the most visible and prominent of all sportswomen, lends her voice to narrating said story. 

The women at the centre of the new film, like Williams, are pioneers, game-changers in their own right, but whose stature has been unjustly buried and forgotten by the world of their chosen sport – football. It’s a story of negligence and sexism that draws on a range of significant modern issues, like the intersection of sports and politics, the misogyny at the heart of the devaluing of women’s sport, the function of commercialism in the way a sport functions on a global scale, and so on. 

It’s also one that many, myself included, had never heard about until now.

To set the scene: it’s 1971, and the powers-that-be in the football world have all but crushed the women’s sport into obscurity for reasons that should be easy enough to decipher. In Mexico, however, a tournament – an unofficial Women’s Football World Cup – is taking place in the country’s largest stadiums before enormous, enthusiastic crowds. The footage is remarkable.

As legendary player Brandi Chastain says when she’s shown clips of women playing the sport before astonishing numbers of people: “Why didn’t I know about this? It makes me very happy and… quite infuriated, to be honest.”

The story of the Copa 71 tournament has been compiled by filmmakers Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, British documentarians with a long history of exploring sport in film. 

“One of the things about sport is it has a great natural dramatic structure,” Erskine explains. “We're very focused on making films that feel like they’re as emotionally  powerful as scripted films. Sport can contain all the social problems of the world. If we put them within the lens, in the rectangle of a tennis court or football pitch, it creates a clear universe that people understand. We have heroes, we have villains, we have conflict, passion, injustice – all the things that we'd encounter in our daily lives.”

Their team stumbled upon an interview with the reunited players of the tournament some 50 years later, opening up a world heretofore unknown to them.. “We felt immediately that if we didn't know about it, then probably very few people in the world did. Those are exactly the kind of stories that we felt we should tell,” explains Ramsay.

Deftly, the filmmakers weave together breathless matches and telling behind-the-scenes footage of the event with remembrances from a swathe of players from all over the world, traversing from Mexico to Britain, South America to Europe in order to get the perspectives of players from every team in the tournament. It’s a remarkable logistical achievement, unearthing not only the footage that has been long-buried, but the people who have long-since mourned and moved on from their inauspiciously cut-short careers (suffice to say the blowback for the tournament hits the players most cruelly). 

Erskine likens the process of finding the footage to unearthing dinosaur bones. “The bones are scattered all over and they've been dragged around and you've just got to have loads of people digging, hoping you find enough and it makes enough sense that you can see the whole picture in the end.”

Footage was sourced from archives across the globe, but also in the attics of regular people, unaware they were sitting on a vital historical document. “We knew from all of the testimonies of the women that they’d had photographers with them the whole time,” explains Ramsay. “Our team of Mexican researchers tracked down a particular room in a particular library in a vault in Mexico City, took us there and they sort of paraded out with these three crates that had been sealed since 1971. That was very special.”

One of the key villains of the film is FIFA, the notorious, mafia-like organisation with an iron-grip on the football world that persists even today. Their opposition to Copa, and to women’s sport in general, is captured in sequences of astonishing sexism and misogyny that wouldn’t be out of place in early seasons of Mad Men. 

When it came time to recognise the tournament as the landmark it was, the filmmakers found the animosity toward the tournament had changed in tone. “I think that was sort of disinterest [rather than outright hostility],” Ramsay says. “Their lack of belief in what it could be, the scale of what it could be. And the idea was that if it did exist, it would’ve been a one-off event rather than proof of a continued movement that had been buried.”

What is revealed in the documentary though, is an assembly of trailblazers who, if not providing the catalyst for the flourishing women’s football scene of today, at least proved that the women’s sport isn’t just a new thing or a passing fad.

“I think what’s really important is that the film shows that there’s a deep history to women’s soccer,” Erskine explains. “It wasn’t invented yesterday by some marketing guy. It’s been played by women, organised by women to play together since the 19th century. And actually, the struggle to get to play is a struggle of gender oppression, not of desire or ability.”

Now, with Copa 71 releasing to the world, the impact of these players and their legacy has manifested in unexpected ways – including spurring Ramsay, who has largely worked in producing up to now, to make the jump to co-directing with this, her debut. “It became very clear that I felt a really strong connection with the women that we were researching and talking to, even if they’re a few generations different from me,” Ramsay explains.

“I didn’t grow up as a sports player but there was so much I related to in the way that they talked about their passion, their belief that they had a right to self-expression, however that manifests, if that’s through football or elsewhere. We made an agreement early on that we knew that this film had to be told through their voices. There are lots of other ways of telling that story; following that instinct was very important.”

The hope is that the footage proves inspiring, while also reminding viewers of the work left to do – an idea mirrored in Chastain’s mixed emotions at the beginning of the film. 

“I’d hope that people are able to join those women on that emotional journey, on the excitement of getting to Mexico, the celebration of being there, and then the pain of being taken away,” says Ramsay. “Sports can be a brilliant mirror to look at society and look at how people are treated within society. We wanted to show that excitement of these women experiencing one of the best moments of their life, but then also the flip side.”

If the women of Copa ‘71 are symbols of anything, they are symbols of self-determination, Ramsay summarises. “I hope it’s a reminder that no one has the right to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't be doing.”

• Copa 71 is now screening in select cinemas nationwide. Read James Croot's review on The Post here.