Original subtitles

Do you know what we're here

to talk about today, Brandi?

Women's soccer.

Well, specifically about

the first Women's World Cup, which was when?

1991.

And you were there, right?

Representing the U.S.A.?

I've actually got something I'd quite like you to watch.

Okay.

That's a massive stadium.

It's a men's football match?

It's women's football.

What?

Okay, this is women's football.

What year was this?

1971.

This is unbelievable.

¡Goal!

Why didn't I know about this?

It makes me very happy and...

quite infuriated, to be honest with you.

I mean...

I-I'm almost at a loss for words.

Once in a while,

you come across a story

that has to be seen to be believed.

Mexico City, 1971.

A global tournament

of unprecedented scale is about to begin.

But despite the record-breaking crowds,

you'll find no mention of this event

in any official history.

And the film footage has been hidden

for over 50 years.

Why?

Because all the players on the pitch...

are women.

Tears rolled down me cheeks,

and I remember thinking,

"I'm never gonna see anything like this again."

¡Goal!

¡Goal!

We didn't even speak about it

'til nearly 50 years later.

When I was about five or six,

my dad took me down to Newcastle.

It was freezing cold.

And the snow, it was comin' up to the top of me Wellys.

And we got the park,

and it was a Saturday.

All of a sudden, I heard this massive roar.

And it sank the life out of me.

"What was that?

What was that? What was that noise?"

My dad said, "They're playing football."

It was euphoric.

And I thought, "One day, that's what I want to do."

But all through school,

and we were never allowed to play football, ever.

Netball...

hockey...

anything but football.

Allez.

To understand the reasons

for the resistance to women's football,

one has to go back to the 19th century.

Right from the beginning,

there's a real energy for women's football.

And, in England, by 1917,

you have perhaps 100 clubs.

And the numbers are building and building.

But then many doctors

start publishing articles in very reputable journals

saying football is dangerous for women.

"This is bad for women's health

and their wombs and their ovaries."

And so, in 1921,

the English Football Association

says to all of its members,

"If you allow women to use your facilities,

"you will be banned and excluded

from the Football Association."

Immediately, a lot of European football associations follow,

and in Italy and Brazil,

it becomes a criminal offense for women to play football.

Women's football carried on being played,

but it's being forced to the margins.

It's almost invisible.

The first thing that hits you

about an operational fighter station is the noise.

When I left school,

you were expected to get married,

settle down, have kids,

and cook.

That's about it.

I didn't want to do that,

so I joined the Air Force.

I thought, "I bet if I join the Air Force,

I'll be able to play football there."

At lunchtime, I used to play five-a-side with the lads.

This one day, I saw a load of girls starting to play

in the next five-a-side.

I was looking and looking.

I thought, "They're playing football."

And I was gob-smacked,

'cause I had not seen this before.

On a field, girls playing.

Here it is.

There they are.

Where have you been all me life?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was definitely a case of that.

Welcome to the Memorial Park, Coventry,

where a local derby is in progress.

This is ladies' football.

Who wouldn't be happy going through the sixties?

It was a revolution.

Congratulations, Trudy.

What's a nice girl like you doing

playing football, though?

What's wrong with playing football?

Well, it's a man's game, isn't it?

No. Sport's for everybody.

Why are you so mad keen on football?

Why don't you play hockey or something like that?

Well, it's always been football

since I was about three.

Up and down the country, ladies in proper football gear

all playing different teams.

This match was played soon after

the Football Association had been nagged

into allowing women's teams to play on affiliated grounds.

Just the most amazing time.

I think our society, was a very big step

- Mm-hmm. - to be accepted.

I can knit, and I can use a chain saw.

But, you know, I don't want to be put in a box.

We didn't play football

because we want to attack the men.

I played football because I like to play football.

You must have the mickey taken out of you quite a lot.

Do you get accused of being a tomboy

- or something like that? - Yes.

What's your reaction to that?

I don't care.

In England, there was no newspaper coverage,

apart from people making horrible comments.

They weren't particularly interested

or in favor of women playing football.

Barriers seemed to be people in authority

and not necessarily "people" in authority,

now, to be clear about it. It was men in authority.

I had decided that, uh, if I am re-elected,

that I'd propose a president to act, say, for four years.

In the late 1960s,

all the people who run football, they're all men.

And FIFA, the governing body of global football,

has a fundamentally and profoundly

conservative outlook on the world.

They think that basically women's football

is a disreputable, immoral, immodest activity.

They still come to the idea of football

as an exclusively masculine space

for celebrating masculine virtues.

In 1970,

Mexico hosted the men's World Cup.

And it was just magnetic.

The Estadio Azteca was an architectural marvel.

It was the first World Cup that was transmitted in color.

And Pelé!

Well, it had to be Pelé.

We see the final in the men's World Cup

was very impressive.

A very special dream to go on the same ground.

Yeah. You know, we all have crazy dreams,

but, uh, not all come true.

Not...

Carlos Alberto's coming up on his right!

Oh, magnificent!

Magnificent!

When you organize an event like the World Cup,

that meant that the eyes of the world were on you.

So businessmen who want to keep making money

said, given the infrastructure already there,

"Why don't we try something else?"

"Why don't we try a women's World Cup?"

Obviously there is a lot of resistance.

FIFA was not behind it.

The Mexican Federation was not behind it,

let alone the rest of the federations.

"Dear Professor...

"As there is...

"no official world recognition of women's soccer

"and therefore no world-governing body,

"this Association does not recognize

"the tournament being run in Mexico City

as the World Cup of women's soccer."

The manager of my local team was Harry Batt.

I told you this before.

For God's sake, don't all fall back in defense.

I want you to keep on the pass.

He just had big plans for ladies' football in general.

And Harry didn't play by the F.A. rules.

Attack is the best form of defense.

Now, then, off you go, girls.

He had been talking for a while

about the Copa del Mundo.

There was no official English team at that point,

because they had just had the ban lifted.

So it just sounded like there

wasn't a possibility that it was gonna happen.

But Harry was really forward-thinking in his ideas,

and he traveled around the country

to scout players for the team.

And he wasn't shy of going out and hustling.

One day, we'd just finished

training at the ground,

and Harry calls us over, and he said, "Girls,

I got something to tell you."

And I thought it was really bad news.

He said, "Martini Rossi are gonna sponsor us

to go to Mexico to play in the World Cup Final."

Oh, God.

Me legs were like jelly.

We were unofficial, of course.

No, uh, support from Danish Football Association at all.

So we had to do it ourselves,

with support from friends and families.

Getting on that plane was, like, surreal.

None of us had been on a plane before, not any of us.

To go somewhere like that,

and for ordinary, working-class girls,

it was a dream.

Got to Mexico, and they pull a ladder up,

and the doors open.

And all these flash lights went off.

Just light, light everywhere.

You couldn't see.

And I said, "There's someone famous on this plane."

But it was us.

Going from England,

where women were frowned upon for playing football,

to go somewhere like that and see other countries even.

It was like a parallel universe.

Coming out of the airport, and it was lined,

just lined and lined and lined and lined with people.

And they was throwing things at the coach.

We thought they were trying to get us.

But what they were doing

was throwing presents in the window for us.

We'd landed in a world that we didn't know.

Of course FIFA and the officials

look at this as a kind of disgrace.

They don't like anything about it.

They don't like the fact that somebody else

is taking their name, the "World Cup."

You add to it that it's a women's World Cup.

That's ringing a lot of alarm bells.

And so FIFA say to the Mexican Football Federation,

"If you use these stadiums for women's football,

we're gonna fine you, we're gonna ban you."

So instead of going to the small provincial stadiums,

they force the tournament

into two of the largest stadiums in Mexico,

the Jalisco...

and the Azteca...

places that the Football Association does not control.

The dominant Mexican media group owns them.

But to fill 110,000 in the Azteca,

the organizers have to go all out to promote this thing.

And that's what they did.

Through all of their, uh, magazines, their television,

their radio, their newspapers.

Time, weather, and...

We have a photographer attached to us the whole time.

Uh, we're really gonna stress the feminine angle.

Uh, women who play soccer

are not muscular monstrosities,

no, but, like, generally pretty girls.

Then medias follow our trip very close,

and the papers write a lot of things.

There will be, uh, beauty salons

in the dressing rooms.

Uniforms will be as close as possible to hot pants.

It's natural.

The combination of the passions

of most men around the world, soccer and women.

It was literally like a wave hitting you.

You thought it would knock you off your feet.

I was used to only six people watching you.

I had to shake meself, pinch meself.

And it wasn't just young kids.

It was men, grown men.

¡Rah, rah, rah!

¡México! ¡México!

¡Rah, rah, rah!

¡Goal, goal, goal, goal!

¡Bum, bum!

¡Bim, bum, bah!

Chiquitibumalabimbumba.

¡Bim, bum, bah!

¡México! ¡México!

¡Rah, rah, rah!

We used to train in the morning at 7:00.

Even then, there was about 300 or 400 children watching us.

The training was physically hard,

because it got so hot.

The altitude was just, um, wow...

It was real tough circuit training.

The physicality of it, just absolutely loved it.

Carol was a hard taskmaster.

She really put us through out paces every day.

To be captain, I think you've got to take

some responsibility for the team, you know.

You've got to try and pull them together.

And if there's any nerves, you gotta try and settle them.

I didn't see Argentina as a threat to us.

Little did we know what was to come.

You've got to literally pull yourself together

and give yourself a good talking-to.

'Cause this is it. There's no second run.

When we scored, my feet

didn't hit the ground for about three seconds.

I was up in the air.

There was no question

about the fact that we weren't going away.

We all underestimated the Argentinean team.

¡Goal, goal!

I can remember being very despondent.

It's not the scenario we planned.

We're in Mexico City for 14 days.

And then we went in an old bus across the Mexican country.

To Guadalajara,

where we are going to play the two first games.

But the bus breaks down in the desert.

And we didn't know what to do.

But then the Italian team came back for us.

The Italian team has a new bus.

With air conditioned, everything.

And they brought us to Guadalajara.

The games that were in Guadalajara,

they were live on TV.

Never seen women playing on TV at all.

First time you saw it, it was just like, "Wow."

You couldn't believe what you were seeing.

Was just brilliant.

We won 3-0,

and, uh, we were quite happy about the result.

Drove down this steep slope.

And the nerves were going, you know.

We could-- couldn't really hear all of the sound,

so we had no idea what it was like out there.

The noise...

was just...

I'll never forget it.

It was hard. It was the altitude.

It was the heat.

It was the different level.

It was very...

very, very, very physical.

Carol ended up in-- with her leg in plaster.

And it was a-- a bone in my foot that was broken.

It was devastating.

It was devastating when we lost.

And most of us were pretty much reduced to tears.

Sadly, that's how it was.

Nevertheless, getting that far on a world stage,

we achieved something.

And when we got back to the hotel,

some children had made a little placard

to say that we might have lost the game,

but you've won the hearts of Mexico,

so crikey.

The whole of the Mexican team

came over to our hotel

to give their condolences and wish us well.

Feeling was we wanted to stay out there

until the final was over.

We did an awful lot of things.

We did tours. We opened shops.

We went to dinners.

Each embassy put on a party.

We had so much fun

around our training and our matches.

When we were walking on the streets,

shopping or buying souvenirs,

we also, every time, have a big crowd around us,

making auto-- autographs.

It's a lot of different stories.

It's not only about football.

To be in a tournament dedicated to women,

in the beginning, we didn't think that much about it.

But during the tournament,

we felt that it was important for women all over the world

to see that this was possible.

Copa 1971 is a huge success.

It's got unbelievable levels of press coverage.

It demonstrated clearly the commercial potential,

and so that is worrying for FIFA.

"Gah. You know, this is just

the tip of the iceberg, isn't it?"

The immediate reaction is like all wounded men,

negative, violent, and aggressive.

So the call begins to go out from FIFA.

"If there's a women's football association in your country,

you need to find a way of actually controlling it."

It's about authority,

and it's about who's the boss.

It's both a gender issue, and it's a control issue.

¿Sí?

We play against Argentina in the semi-final.

We won 5-0.

Now Mexico and Denmark

are going to meet each other in the final.

People in the city came to our hotel in the night.

Sitting on top of the cars with a Mexican flag,

and they cry, "Mexico! Mexico! Rah, rah, rah!"

¡México! ¡México!

And the whole night,

they drove around our hotel.

We couldn't sleep.

Then the Danish embassy arranged

that we could go and sleep

with Danish families in Mexico City.

That was very nice.

¡Bim, bum, bah!

¡México! ¡México!

¡Rah, rah, rah!

And the next day, Mexico said,

"We will not play the match."

It's only logical for women to say, "Okay,

why aren't we being paid for this?"

"There's sponsorship.

"Tickets are being sold.

"Somebody else's pocket is getting quite full.

We should also be getting paid for this."

The first step towards independence is having money.

When women start to ask for money for your work,

there tends to be a very big resistance.

"You're greedy. You're ambitious.

You don't want to help out."

These women were challenging so many norms.

I don't think they had much of an idea

of what they were culturally doing

or the significance of their acts.

They just translated into something

that was, uh, transgressive,

and they were being incredibly brave at the time.

We took off in our very, very, very, very old bus.

In the front...

- Police. - ...police.

Uh, the motorbike. Rr-rr.

Blue light and everything.

On every corner,

there was a policeman standing with a motorbike

and talking in his br-br-br-br-br.

That was very exciting.

We sat there. "Oh, oh, oh, that's us coming here."

The atmosphere was electric.

It was-- It was amazing.

When we go up to the field,

you hardly see the sky,

because it's so big.

We couldn't speak to each other,

because the crowd around the field was so excited.

We go around the field waving to people.

We are not nervous.

And we are smiling, and, uh, we are not--

It looks happy.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

And we were happy.

Early in the game, the Mexicans

had some few big opportunities to go.

But we felt confident.

The Mexican players was, uh, not so high.

Alicia Vargas, she was a good player,

a very good technique.

When we focus on her,

it was easier to shut down their play.

- You are a team. Yeah. - A team.

And we had one goal together.

- Winning the World Cup. - Yes.

We just were so happy.

Yeah, it was an angel with wings.

- And below it. - Yes.

Standing on the Earth.

- Yeah. - Yes.

Captain was standing there and got this trophy.

And she was not so high.

I sai-- Oh, we said,

"Oh, nobody can see her."

- And then we lifted her up. - So we lifted her. Yeah.

Yes, because they had to see.

And then she sat there with the trophy.

Proud.

- I think we were proud. - Yes.

It was the highest point, uh, ever and forever.

Whenever they said about women's football,

it was always a negative thing,

and there was no interest.

Nobody would sponsor it. Crowds wouldn't come.

The final, it had the lot.

Crowd were there.

The sponsorship was all 'round on the ground.

So we thought, "This is it.

"This is it now.

"Women's football's got it,

and it's on the map."

When we came back,

there was a lot of press and photographs.

We were in the Danish television.

And then...

Then nothing else.

I was so naive that I thought

we can go on from the spot where we were

and build up.

But the men said, "Uh-uh.

No, no. There has been enough publicity about women."

They took a piece of rubber and did so.

Now we start from scratch.

Maybe they envy us, this success.

The men didn't do it,

and, uh, we did it, win the World Championship.

Why couldn't they use, uh, our success to build on?

Why?

I don't understand it.

Do you understand it?

No?

No?

Because we are women.

Yeah. Because we are women,

we are so stupid, we don't understand.

Maybe we must not play football.

We arrived at the airport,

and I can't remember seeing one photographer there.

Nobody there to meet you.

No bunches of flowers.

No invitations to parties.

Nobody really wanting to know you.

It was less than the one man and his dog

who used to turn out and play--

and see us play on our Sundays.

And then we found out we got banned.

Because when we got banned,

inside ourselves it-- we were shamed.

We never spoke about it. Never spoke about it.

And thus women's football,

despite the incredible energies of the era,

is crushed.

Football associations hold the monopoly

over organized football.

And the threat is to their control of the game.

It's about power and money,

and it's about defending those things

for an exclusively male population.

I was invited to go

to a dinner with Newcastle United,

so I said to me dad, "Hey, Dad, do you wanna come?"

I was invited up on the stage by this comper.

He said, "Oh, we've got a big superstar

"in the audience tonight.

"We've got Carol Wilson.

She's captain of the England's lady team."

And it was a huge build-up.

But the minute I got on the stage,

he did nothing but rip women's football apart.

Everybody was laughing,

and I was humiliated.

I come off the stage,

and me first words to me dad were,

"No, I'm finished with football.

I'm finished."

And I didn't even speak to any of the girls

'til nearly 50 years later.

Yeah, that's the story.

That's the story.

I saw a little bit of confusion.

Yeah, around here.

Go! Go! Go! Yeah!

- Here! Here! - Yeah.

Good cross.

When I was growing up,

I didn't ever dream of playing in a World Cup.

I never thought about playing in the Olympic Games.

Because they didn't exist.

I knew nothing of Copa 1971.

No one had ever spoken a word

about this tremendous tournament.

Ashamed to say that, but it's true.

It's incredible that there was an event

that occurred like this, of this magnitude.

The fact that women soccer players

who, like myself, have been playing at the top of my game

and playing for my country, um, for 13, 14 years,

have never heard of that,

um, it's just unacceptable.

This is just intentional,

to hide women's football.

Knowing the story of 1971 now,

seeing the stadium, and watching them on the field,

I-I feel this closeness.

Because without them,

'91 may not have happened.

From '91 to the World Cup,

to '96, the first Olympic Games...

...to then 1999...

Goal!

...and the exponential growth of women's football...

Yes, we play sports. Yes, we play soccer.

Yes, we're female athletes.

But we're so much more than that.

Perception of women's soccer has changed dramatically.

We have a thriving domestic league here in the U.S.

and in many other countries.

No, we're not done.

We're never done, ever.

Honestly, the women in 1971

and the women in 2023,

we're no different from each other.

Those women, they're warriors.

It's up to us to tell the stories,

to make sure that history is right.

Because now I can say-- When people say,

"Thank you so much for starting what you did,"

I'll say, "Oh, no.

"I have some women to tell you about.

You don't know them, but you will."

Actually believe that, along with many others,

we paved the way for what it's become today.

They're no stopping us now.

¡Bim bum bah!

¡México! ¡México!

¡Rah, rah, rah!