The shameful treatment of women’s football after an unofficial tournament in Mexico in 1971 is the subject of this absorbing documentary

Both Fifa and the UK’s Football Association have had an awful lot to be ashamed of over the years, but hardly anything as bad as the breathtakingly spiteful, sexist and dishonest way they treated women’s football in the last century, particularly after the spectacular success of the 1971 Women’s World Cup in Mexico, an independent event defiantly held outside Fifa’s pompous auspices and discussed now in this riveting documentary.

An independent women’s football association had held its inaugural Women’s World Cup in Italy in 1970 with sponsorship from Martini vermouth. Then, a year later, they staged their ambitious Copa 71 in Mexico with fixtures in two national venues which Fifa couldn’t control: the Jalisco stadium in Guadalajara and, in Mexico City, the Azteca stadium. The...