We propose and analyse a mixed formulation for the Brinkman–Forchheimer equations for unsteady flows. Our approach is based on the introduction of a pseudostress tensor related to the velocity gradient and pressure, leading to a mixed formulation where the pseudostress tensor and the velocity are the main unknowns of the system. We establish existence and uniqueness of a solution to the weak formulation in a Banach space setting, employing classical results on nonlinear monotone operators and a regularization technique. We then present well posedness and error analysis for semidiscrete continuous-in-time and fully discrete finite element approximations on simplicial grids with spatial discretization based on the Raviart–Thomas spaces of degree for the pseudostress tensor and discontinuous piecewise polynomial elements of degree for the velocity and backward Euler time discretization. We provide several numerical results to confirm the theoretical rates of convergence and illustrate the performance and flexibility of the method for a range of model parameters.