In August 1971, more than 100,000 football fans packed Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium for a historic tournament. Teams from England, France, Denmark, Argentina and Italy flew in for 21 days of matches alongside Mexico’s national team, while eager sponsors lined up for a piece of the action. The players, who received a hero’s welcome wherever they went, might as well have been the Rolling Stones.

They were, in fact, a group of around 100 women — many of them teenagers — taking part in the first unofficial Women’s World Cup. And just as quickly as they tasted fame, it was snatched away as the tournament was all but erased from football history.

In a new documentary premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in September, the global football event known as COPA 71 will finally get its due more than half a century later, mere months after the ninth edition of the FIFA Women’s World Cup kicked off in Australia and New Zealand. The irony, of course, is that as far as FIFA is concerned, the women’s games officially launched with the 1991 World Cup in China: Football’s international governing body still doesn’t acknowledge the Mexico tournament.

“Imagine if you played in front of 100,000 people, and you’re still told, ‘No, this didn’t happen to you,’” says Rachel Ramsay, co-director of “COPA 71.” “The idea that women’s football did not progress because women didn’t want it to is a myth that’s been percolating for a long time, along with the idea that women’s football was never commercial, that women didn’t want to play and that women weren’t any good. That’s what [this film] blasts out of the water.”

Produced by “Senna’s” Victoria Gregory and directed by Ramsay and “Sachin” helmer James Erskine, “COPA 71” opens with two-time Women’s World Cup champion Brandi Chastain looking puzzled as she’s shown footage of the tournament. Later, Team USA forward Alex Morgan is equally mystified when she’s told about the 1971 games.

“They literally had no idea,” says Erskine.

COPA 71 was organized by the Italy-headquartered Federation of Independent European Female Football (FIEFF), and was set up in Mexico because it had just hosted the men’s 1970 FIFA World Cup. The existing infrastructure of the Azteca stadium and enthusiastic support of local sponsors made a women’s tournament not only appealing, but commercially savvy. Yet as the event came together, FIFA tried to prevent it from happening at all. While it did go ahead — and proved to be a smashing success — its legitimacy was undermined from the get-go, and the event failed to receive the international acclaim and attention it deserved. (FIFA was not approached to take part in the documentary beyond sharing archive of the org’s existing tournaments.)

Fast forward 50-odd years, and many of the original players are finally ready — thanks to the encouragement of Ramsay and Erskine — to tell their stories, beginning with the unbridled sexism they encountered growing up playing football, to their otherworldly experience in Mexico and finally the crushing realization upon returning home that no one gave a damn.

“The women were very, very generous and really wanted to share their life stories, but at the same time, they’ve been told for 50 years that this didn’t happen,” says Ramsay. “You can see that and feel that. A huge part of empowering anybody is to recognize what they’ve gone through and to say, ‘Yes, this did happen and you’re not mad.’”

Ramsay and Erskine, who previously collaborated on Prime Video series “This Is Football,” first got wind of the tournament in 2019 through a BBC Radio 4 interview with U.K. captain Carol Wilson. “I remember James calling me and just being like, ‘This is the perfect story,’” says Ramsay. “I had a quick Google, but there didn’t seem to be anything out there. But I thought, ‘Surely not. We’ve developed and researched so many stories like this; it can’t be one that we missed.’”

When the world went into lockdown, the team had the time and space to carry out a deep dive for archival material. As they located the players and secured interviews, they were able to access personal items commemorating the event that many of the women had held onto. “They kind of knew at the time that no one else was interested,” explains Ramsay.

“I remember the first time seeing some of those full-page color ads and newspaper coverage, and the photographs and stills were really mind-boggling,” adds Ramsay. “You still feel like the coverage of that tournament was bigger than some of the World Cup that we’re seeing at the moment.”

Adds Erskine: “We basically started out looking for snippets of VHS knocking around in someone’s garage and then working our way backwards.” If there were cameras in shot in the footage, that presented a new lead because someone, somewhere out there, knew something about that game. All told, it took 18 months to piece together footage from a variety of sources, including broadcast archives in Italy, France and Mexico and even Super 8 footage from audience members.

“There was no one big source that provided us with hours and hours of footage,” says Ramsay. “They’d all been chopped up, so it’s not like you have all the minutes of a match to work with. You have bits and bobs from different places.”

Backed from the beginning by U.K. documentary specialists Dogwoof, “COPA 71” was pitched at Danish documentary forum CPH:DOX in 2022 and received extensive interest from other partners. Ultimately, the team aligned itself with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Westbrook, which had a relationship with Serena and Venus Williams from the biopic “King Richard.” The tennis legends quickly boarded the project as executive producers, and Serena Williams — who co-owns Los Angeles football team Angel City — also lent her voice to a short segment at the beginning of the film.

“They really wanted to be championing the story and lending their voice to the chorus, to ensure that it could be as amplified as possible, into as many markets as possible,” says Erskine.

With the Women’s World Cup now almost a week in, it may be natural to wonder why the film isn’t releasing widely in order to leverage momentum around the sport. That was the original intention, says Erskine. “But our biggest realization when making the film was that the story was so much bigger, and we wanted to get it right.”

“If the film gets a bounce because the world is suddenly focused on women’s soccer via the World Cup, that’s great, but we made this film to be watched on any day of the week for the next 10, 20 or 30 years,” he adds. “We didn’t make it just to be ancillary content.”

Ramsay adds: “It’s a real boost for the film that everyone does believe that pegging it to the World Cup right now isn’t necessary for a success. That’s what people see: that it does stand on its own.”

Ultimately, every superhero has an origin story. And for the women of COPA 71, this is theirs.

“It makes it timely and continually relevant,” says Erskine. “We’re lucky to have this story at a time when these people are still with us. In five years’ time, we might be looking at a very different film.”

Keisha Zollar is no stranger to the picket line. She’d been on strike with the WGA for weeks before her second guild, SAG-AFTRA, joined the writers.

“I’m [on] double strike,” Zollar tells The Times. “How do I feel? How many expletives can I say? It’s simmering frustration at the minimization of the value of my work.”

But for Zollar, the strikes are not just difficult because she cannot work. Picketing is also hard on her body. The “Astronomy Club” creator has had a chronic illness since she was 12, and when WGA went on strike in May, she picketed so often she ended up having a flare.

“When I have a flare, it’s joint pain, I get eye problems, a whole host of things,” says Zollar. “Standing hurts.” Access to a clean, safe bathroom is crucial; in the past, Zollar ended up hospitalized after getting a life-threatening infection from lack of access. “It’s so very hard on the body and this is going to take sustained action.”

Zollar is among a group of disabled writers who have received funding from Inevitable Foundation, a group striving to empower mid-level disabled screenwriters. Their hope is to destigmatize disability and diversify culture by focusing on the root of who tells stories in Hollywood.

“The industry feels like it’s at a unique crossroads where it can either go back to the way it was and keep perpetuating systems that exclude people, or we can have the turning point,” says Zollar.

She fears that if Hollywood relies on AI to create work, it would only flatten representation further. “The idea that you do not value human contributions and human labor is a real plague on society,” says Zollar, adding that the issue goes beyond entertainment. “There are some people who want to really reduce the power of humans, not use technology to empower humans.”

Zollar adds that the people creating the technology often aren’t a reflection of our diverse society. “We are replicating some of the same [biased] systems without that human element, the place in us where we’re able to touch empathy. So we’re not starting off from an inclusive place. That’s why we need more humans in this conversation, not fewer.”

Sheridan O’Donnell is another filmmaker who received financial support from Inevitable Foundation. He is also worried about AI being exploited to minimize the role of screenwriters.

“If disability is on the caboose of the writing chain, we will be the first people to get pushed out of jobs,” he tells The Times. O’Donnell says that if screenplays are written by AI based on previously existing material, it will only further produce stories full of tropes and cliches.

“You’ll have shows with disabled characters and there won’t be a writer with that disability in the room,” says O’Donnell, who has retinitis pigmentosa, a rare eye condition that slowly results in vision loss. He also stresses that disabled workers are not a monolith: “Representation isn’t enough if it’s misrepresentation.”

“The story starts with the writers. If you’re able to create change at that starting point, it’s going to have the biggest trickle-down effect,” says Inevitable Foundation co-founder Marisa Torelli-Pedevska. Even before the strike, the group had launched an initiative to promote hiring disabled writers — not just disability consultants, who are paid less than writers and often don’t have decision-making authority. But when it was clear a strike was imminent, Inevitable Foundation shifted its focus to creating an emergency relief fund.

“The writers that are multiply and historically marginalized, [those with disabilities] among them, are the ones that are going to hurt the most from the strike,” says co-founder Richie Siegel. In a survey conducted leading up to the strike, Inevitable Foundation found that 57% of writers surveyed said they would lose work or income if there was a strike, with a potential loss of more than $2 million in earnings. Forty-three percent said they had less than three months of savings and 67% said they had less than six months.

Pre-strike, the group received substantial funding from the studios, who, of course, were now on the other side of the table and wouldn’t be donating to a relief fund. So, Siegel said, Inevitable turned to showrunners like Julie Plec, Ashley Lyle, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz for funding, plus individual donations and other foundations. The emergency relief fund disperses unrestricted cash grants to union and nonunion members who identify as disabled, including those with mental health conditions or chronic illnesses.

“It just costs more money to be disabled,” says Torelli-Pedevska. A disabled person needs to make on average $17,690 more annually than an able-bodied person to achieve the same quality of life. To that end, Inevitable Foundation has raised more than $750,000 in direct funding to disabled writers, podcasters and directors in its first three years. “The average person has to pay for rent and food, and disabled people have to do that, plus all of the costs for what they need. Disabled people are going to be the first to be affected in terms of their money dwindling quicker.”

Richie Siegel and Marisa Torelli-Pedesvska founded Inevitable Foundation to empower mid-level disabled screenwriters. Their hope is to destigmatize disability and diversify culture by focusing on the root of who tells stories in Hollywood.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Then there’s the matter of healthcare. Monica Cecilia Lucas is a writer with disabilities who has received financial support from Inevitable Foundation in the past. She’s pro-WGA and has been picketing alongside her fellow screenwriters.

“On a typical year, you need to meet certain work requirements to get your health insurance through the guild,” says Lucas. “It’s scary and threatening for everybody, but for folks with disabilities, it becomes a question of whether you can stick around in the city for another year or whether you have to figure out a different way of keeping yourself alive.”

That’s why Lucas and fellow screenwriters with disabilities told The Times they found it particularly egregious when Deadline recently reported a studio executive saying, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

“It’s cruel, it’s inhumane and it speaks to this pervasive problem that we have in our society, which is profit is the ultimate good that people seek out,” says Lucas. “Whoever that executive is, is saying that they’d rather have homeless children than a little less profit for their shareholders.”

Lucas added that the infuriating comments help empower the workers on strike, as when Bob Iger told CNBC that writers and actors were not being “realistic” in their demands. Hours before Lucas’ interview with The Times, she had spent the morning picketing in front of Disney, alongside actors new to the lines and writers who’d been striking for weeks. She said picketers chatted both about Iger’s comments and the anonymous studio executive.

“It backfires,” she said. “It makes us more secure in the fact that we’re going to keep fighting.”

Monica Cecilia Lucas was among those outraged by recent comments by Hollywood executives dismissing striking workers’ demands. But she’s confident that such language “backfires.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Siegel noted that when executives “say the quiet part out loud” like this, it further underlines the importance of organizations like Inevitable Foundation that are trying to keep underrepresented creatives and artists from leaving the industry: “There’s such a huge risk of loss, specifically for disabled writers, who are less than 1% of the writers working.”

And this loss has real-world implications, given how connected entertainment can be with culture and politics. “Culture can and does drive policy,” says Siegel. “But if these people can’t work and tell those stories, well, how do we change the culture? How do we change policy?”

Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska contend that industry diversity efforts themselves underserve disabled workers. (California is the only state to include disability status in diversity tax credits.) Studios may be hesitant to track disability among their workforce because of legal or medical disclosure issues. Siegel says one way to get around this is by turning it into an identity question: “Do you identify as disabled?”

For all the challenges they face, the urgent need for change means the screenwriters, who credit Inevitable Foundation with building solidarity among writers with disabilities, still see opportunity in the strike — for greater visibility and, O’Donnell hopes, for more empathy from able-bodied screenwriters and actors.

“Can you draw a line between yourself and us?” says O’Donnell. “With the strike, someone is like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to have a job in four months.’ Well, if you’re disproportionately hired, that’s how disabled people feel all of the time.”

For her part, Zollar says she can’t help but be optimistic. “Sometimes it takes labor saying ‘no’ for the people who are in charge to actually listen. They want to make us so desperate that we’ll take nothing and we’ll decline our way into economic oppression. And I’m happy that I am involved in two unions who say, ‘No, we can’t do this anymore.’”