More than two decades before FIFA launched its Women’s World Cup, Danish footballers won two successive international tournaments presented to the public as world championships. Their extraordinary second triumph, before a vast crowd at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, has now returned to view through the documentary Copa 71.
World champions before FIFA was ready
The conventional history of the Women’s World Cup begins in China in 1991, when FIFA staged its first officially sanctioned global championship for women. Yet that version leaves out two remarkable tournaments held in 1970 and 1971—and the Danish teams that won both of them. These competitions were not organised or recognised by FIFA, so their titles do not appear in the official World Cup record. Nevertheless, they were international events conceived, advertised and experienced as women’s world championships, involving teams representing different nations and attracting crowds that demonstrated an appetite for the game long before football’s governing bodies chose to support it. Calling Denmark’s victories “unofficial” is therefore necessary for accuracy, but it should not be used to diminish them. The lack of recognition says far more about the institutions of the period than it does about the footballers on the pitch.
Italy 1970: Denmark’s first world title
The first known international women’s tournament to use the name Coppa del Mondo was staged in Italy from 6 to 15 July 1970. Organised by the independent Federation of European Women’s Football—commonly known by its Italian initials, FIEFF—and sponsored by Martini & Rossi, it brought together seven participating teams and staged matches in cities including Genoa, Bologna, Milan, Bari, Salerno, Naples and Turin. Denmark was represented not by an officially selected national side but largely by Boldklubben Femina, the pioneering Copenhagen women’s club founded in 1959. After progressing through the tournament, the Danes faced hosts Italy in the final at Turin’s Stadio Comunale on 15 July. Before a crowd estimated at between 40,000 and 50,000, Denmark won 2–0 and became the first champion of a women’s competition presented as a World Cup. Helene Østergaard Hansen scored one of the goals and would become the only Danish player to take part in both the 1970 and 1971 triumphs.
Mexico 1971: women’s football fills the Azteca
The following year, the experiment became a mass sporting spectacle. Mexico had hosted the men’s FIFA World Cup in 1970, and its major stadiums, commercial infrastructure and football-mad public were ready for another international event. The 1971 women’s championship, held from 15 August to 5 September in Mexico City and Guadalajara, featured Denmark, Mexico, Argentina, England, France and Italy. It had corporate backing, extensive promotion, televised matches, branded merchandise and a mascot named Xochitl, but its presentation was frequently shaped by the sexism of the age: goalposts were painted with pink bands, promotional material emphasised the players’ appearance and organisers attempted to package football as feminine entertainment. The public, however, treated the matches seriously. Mexico’s games attracted enormous audiences, and the final at the Estadio Azteca was watched by a reported crowd of approximately 110,000—often given more precisely as 112,500—making it one of the largest attendances ever recorded for a women’s sporting event.
Susanne Augustesen’s unforgettable final
Denmark arrived in Mexico as defending champion, although the 1971 squad was not simply a continuation of the Boldklubben Femina side. Players had been recruited through trials held across the country, producing a team coached by Jørgen Andreasen and largely ignored by Denmark’s established football authorities. In the final, the Danes faced the host nation and an overwhelmingly pro-Mexican crowd. Fifteen-year-old Susanne Augustesen responded with one of the most extraordinary performances in the history of international football, scoring all three goals in Denmark’s 3–0 victory. She opened the scoring in the first half and completed her hat-trick after the interval, silencing the Azteca while establishing herself as the emblem of Denmark’s second successive world title. Augustesen subsequently pursued a long career, much of it in Italy, but the scale of what she had achieved as a schoolgirl remained surprisingly obscure outside specialist histories of the women’s game.
Celebrated in Copenhagen, excluded from the official record
The Danish players returned to a celebratory reception at Copenhagen City Hall, yet their achievement occupied an ambiguous place in the country’s football history. The Danish Football Association, DBU, had not sanctioned the tournament and did not formally incorporate women’s football until 1972. Denmark’s first match recognised in the official international record came only in 1974, three years after the team had lifted a world trophy in Mexico. This institutional chronology created a bizarre contradiction: Denmark had produced two women’s world champions before it officially possessed a women’s national team. Recognition arrived slowly. Augustesen was admitted to the Danish Football Hall of Fame in 2016, and the entire 1971 championship team was inducted in 2019. The trophies and surviving objects from the 1970 tournament have also entered the FIFA Museum’s collections, preserving material evidence of a history that FIFA itself did not create.
Copa 71: the tournament returns to the screen
Directed by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, the 2023 documentary Copa 71 reconstructs the Mexican tournament through vivid archive footage and present-day testimony from women who represented Denmark, Mexico, Argentina, England, France and Italy. Executive produced by Serena Williams, Venus Williams and footballer Alex Morgan, the 90-minute film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before reaching cinemas in 2024. Its surviving images are astonishing: crowded terraces, elaborate opening ceremonies, players mobbed like celebrities and the Azteca transformed into the setting for a women’s sporting occasion on a scale that supposedly belonged to a much later age. The film does not merely retrieve an overlooked competition. It asks how an event seen by tens of thousands in the stadiums, covered by television and supported by an enthusiastic public could subsequently disappear from mainstream football history.
A success that threatened the accepted story
The most unsettling lesson of Copa 71 is that women’s football did not need to wait until the 1990s to become viable, exciting or popular. It had already demonstrated all three qualities in Mexico in 1971. What followed was not a natural period of slow development but a failure of institutions to build upon visible success. In several countries, women still faced prohibitions, inadequate facilities or hostility from governing bodies; some of the English participants were even suspended after returning home because they had taken part without official approval. The film also refuses to turn the tournament into an uncomplicated feminist utopia. Its marketing often objectified the players, commercial interests controlled the spectacle and the women did not necessarily receive a fair share of the income they generated. Yet the football itself—and the audience’s response to it—exposed the weakness of every argument that the women’s game lacked quality, drama or public appeal.
Denmark’s place in football history
Denmark cannot claim the 1970 and 1971 trophies as FIFA Women’s World Cups, because FIFA neither organised nor recognised those competitions. But it can—and should—remember the players as winners of the two earliest international tournaments explicitly presented as women’s world championships. They competed under the Danish name, defeated the host nations in successive finals and achieved a global distinction no Danish men’s team has matched. The official status of the events matters, but so does the danger of allowing official records to define the entire past. Copa 71 helps restore the Mexican tournament to public memory; Denmark’s double victory provides its most striking competitive story. These women were not pretending to play a future World Cup. In front of packed stadiums in Turin and Mexico City, they were already playing it.
Suggested Online Sources
FIFA Museum: Danish women’s football pioneers and the 1970 tournament · National Football Museum: the history of the Women’s World Cup · RSSSF: 1970 Coppa del Mondo tournament record · RSSSF: 1971 Women’s World Championship tournament record · The Guardian: the forgotten World Cup that should have changed football · The Guardian: Denmark’s 1971 World Cup victory · CPH:DOX: Copa 71 · Dogwoof: official Copa 71 film page
