The crackling 1970s newsreel shows a vast stadium in Mexico packed with a 100,000-strong crowd waving flags and holding banners as two lines of women jog on to the pitch to banging drums and cheers. The stage is set for an electric international football match. This was the second unofficial Women’s World Cup, which took place at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City in August 1971, with teams from around the world.
For almost two months the country was hooked — matches sold out and the footballers were treated like celebrities. Yet the tournament has been all but wiped from collective memory for the best part of 50 years. Now a new documentary, Copa 71, executive produced by Venus and Serena Williams, is putting the tournament in the spotlight and highlighting the players who blazed a trail for the women’s teams of today.
Trudy McCaffery, 69, was 16 when she was selected for the squad by an enterprising 60-year-old bus conductor from Luton called Harry Batt. He had spotted a business opportunity and assembled a team to compete abroad. He scouted the players in fields and parks near their homes — McCaffery lived near Stevenage. There was no women’s football league in the UK — it was banned in 1921 by the FA, which declared football “quite unsuitable for females”. But for one summer in Mexico we had a glimpse of what women’s football could be.
McCaffery travelled to Mexico with 13 other girls, the youngest of whom was 13. “None of us understood the politics of it — we were just girls there to play football,” says McCaffery, speaking on Zoom with her team-mates, the former captain Carol Wilson, 72, and Chris Lockwood, 67.
“If you ask people now why women’s football is not as big as the men’s game they’ll say that it’s never been commercial. That women don’t want to play and they’re not very good,” says the co-director of Copa 71, Rachel Ramsay. “This story disproves that. It just shows if you build it, they will come.”
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Carol Wilson says that at home in Newcastle she was playing football unofficially in parks and fields: “We’d have jumpers for goalposts.” Many of the girls had never flown before and arrived to a flurry of paparazzi, who followed them round so incessantly they needed a police escort.
McCaffery recalls her mother being worried that she “might run off with some Italian or Mexican bloke”, while Lockwood has fond memories of “all the young kids wanting autographs”.
Although the England team were eliminated at the group stage — Denmark were the eventual champions — it did not put a damper on their tournament. “At the end, two children came with a plaque drawn in crayons that said, ‘You might have lost the game, but you’ve won the heart of Mexico,’ ” Lockwood says. Rather than fly straight home as planned, the team were invited to stay for the final. From there followed a whirlwind of invitations to glamorous embassy parties and excursions to meet fans.
“We were invited to a cocktail party in the British Embassy — it was a grand affair,” says Wilson, who was 19 and able to drink. “I remember seeing Leah [Caleb, the youngest member of the squad] reaching for the drinks tray — she was only 13!”
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McCaffery says that the biggest shock was “coming home to a nothingness”. There were no reports in the papers of the England team’s trip to Mexico. “Only a few weeks before, we had been playing football at a packed-out stadium,” she says. “No one wanted to know. It was bizarre.” The FA also blacklisted Batt, along with his women’s team.
When they came home, the squad lost touch with each other. “I think because it was banned, it made it feel like we did something wrong,” McCaffery says. “Not that long ago, I came close to just chucking my stuff away. I thought, who’s interested in this? It doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”
One of the most moving scenes in the film is when Wilson recalls being invited to Newcastle United to give an after-dinner talk after they came back. “I stood on the stage and the compere totally ridiculed me,” she says. “I said to my dad, ‘That’s it, I’m never playing football again.’ ”
The England squad didn’t reunite until 47 years later, when Lockwood and her two team-mates set out to track down the other women, putting call-outs on Radio 4 and The One Show. As well as interviews with them, the documentary has accounts from players in the Danish, Mexican and Italian teams. Many of them took a lot of convincing to participate in the film. “The women are traumatised,” Ramsay says. “The shame that they were made to feel was so intense. Many of them hadn’t even told their families they’d taken part.”
The women remain angry that the FA has still not acknowledged them and that Batt was exiled. “Harry was ahead of his time,” McCaffery says. “He knew there was appetite for the women’s game.”
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Comparing their experience with where women’s football is now, the three laugh about the advances. “The sports bras,” McCaffery says. “We didn’t have sports bras.”
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“The physio,” adds Carol, who broke her foot in the first match, but played on. “A cold bath and a sponge — that was our physio.”
The first official Fifa Women’s World Cup was held in China in 1991. In a neat circle of events, all three women were present at Wembley Stadium in 2022 when the Lionesses won the Euros and women’s football seemed to enter a new era. “I can’t say how proud I was of them,” Lockwood says.
Wilson, McCaffery and Lockwood don’t want recognition. “I’m happy. I just want girls to know that they can do exactly what they want,” Lockwood says.
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“Women have played football for years and years. Now it is where it is — and long may it continue.”
Copa ’71 — The Lost Lionesses is on tonight, BBC4 at 10pm
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