ON MARCH 13 I attended the launch of the FA’s new strategy for women’s football. Very little information was released in advance, the scale of the plans unknown to the press walking down Wembley Way. The reason? “To make sure you read the document!” Baroness Sue Campbell, drafted in as head of women’s football in a strong statement of intent by the FA at the start of 2016, whispered to us before proceedings began.

With decades of experience in sport, education and more recently as chair of UK Sport, including during Team GB’s record medal haul in 2012, Campbell was handed the power to launch an overarching review of the women’s game and work on plans for development.

And the boldness of the plans didn’t disappoint. Doubling participation by 2020, doubling fans, and consistent success on the world stage — the headline goals of the Gameplan for Growth. It contains a detailed plan of attack from primary age to elite. How to bring more into the game, and how to keep them as young girls, teenagers, professionals, coaches, volunteers and more.

Introducing the proposals, FA CEO Martin Glenn was quick to highlight the historic failings of the organisation that banned the women’s game in 1921 — a year earlier 53,000 people had packed out Goodison Park for a Boxing Day game — stating: “Clearly, over the years, the FA let down women’s football.

“I can’t apologise for it because I wasn’t there then, but we were slow to recognise it and prioritise it.”

Aiming to right the wrongs of nearly a century of neglect is no mean feat.

Because those decades of underfunding, lack of support, even active opposition have come alongside changes in how women view their bodies, health, exercise, competitive sport, and the further genderising of sport. Attitudes to women in football, sport and in society more generally haven’t progressed in a straight line.

And yet the potential is huge. As Glenn pointed out: “There isn’t a better rate of return in any area — if you look at in in economic terms — than women’s football. Every pound spent on women’s football gives the FA a better return than just about any other type of football.”

Half the population has had access to the most popular sport in the country massively limited. Only 35 per cent of girls in primary school are given the chance to play football — having been one of two girls that joined the boys in my north London primary school I was genuinely surprised it is that high.

And despite the barriers, the women that have pushed through against structural and personal odds have proved the game worthy. The success of Team GB reaching the Olympic quarter-finals at London 2012 and finishing third in the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada marked turning points for the women’s game.

But it was success that took the gatekeepers of the game by surprise: “To be honest in 2015 the success was unexpected. We were ranked seventh or eighth in the world and we outperformed and finished third.

“The effect that had on the country was tremendous. Four million people watching a game in Canada at 3am shows how it really caught the public’s imagination,” Glenn enthused.

And that enthusiasm is infectious. Although it’s hard to gauge how infectious to the room of mostly male, older (sorry), white journalists in attendance. It’s rare to see so many big-hitters of sports journalism showing up to an event promoting women’s football.

The women’s game often struggles for inches in national newspapers and has a limited web presence. Yet if anything, journalism also has a responsibility and a role to play in helping women’s football to grow.

Sports journalism over the years has played a huge part in the success and continual growth of the men’s game into the beast it is today. It’s been a reciprocal relationship, with media outlets benefiting from the growth in popularity as punters increasingly seek out information on their clubs and superstar players.

Despite the turnout, while there have been a few opinion pieces — mainly restricted to papers’ websites rather than print editions; and certainly not helped by the press conference taking place a few hours before Chelsea and Manchester United’s FA Cup quarterfinal clash — there has been little fanfare about the scheme itself either in print or online.

In fact, rather than the ins and outs of the strategy, many top journalists were more interested in the, not unimportant but not central, anecdotal stories familiar to anyone who has followed women’s football over the years — such as Arsenal captain Alex Scott working in the men’s team laundry at the start of her career.

And it’s undoubtedly the lack of women in sports journalism that is part of the problem in coverage, both in the room and in the conversation on women and football as a whole.

How can a middle-aged man understand the nuances of why young girls and teenagers start to have an aversion to sports, one of the biggest areas that needs addressing? I doubt many beyond me and the two other female print journalists there could genuinely comprehend the task of capturing the imagination of a five-year-old girl and keeping it through some of the most formative years of her life.

Kelly Simmons, FA football participation and development director, was tasked with talking through how the FA plans to turn the numbers wanted into a reality. It’s important “to understand the barriers that prevent girls from playing football and find out what would attract girls and keep them in the game” — crucially introducing football in the critical five to eight age range “before they are switched off from sports.”

Simmons and Campbell trotted out the important role football can play in “fun, fitness, friends and families.” But the rhetoric is backed up by concrete plans. There are 200 “wildcat clubs” currently being rolled out and plans to expand to 1,000 by 2018. Grow the Game grants are being provided to new teams. Ten high-performance centres are planned.

Support for teachers and schools at both primary and secondary are promised, with emphasis put on how to make football attractive to head teachers by focusing on how it can complement and boost other areas of the curriculum as well as mental and physical health.

There are new appointments to drive the plans forward: a head of women’s performance, a head of women’s coach development, a women’s refereeing manager and a head of marketing and commercial for women’s football.

The approach seems more serious than anything that has come before, the proposals comprehensive. There appears to be a genuine desire to transform women’s football and women’s relationship with sport generally as a result. But there are also huge hurdles to the success of the project, many beyond the direct control of the FA.

The big question that jumped out is whether schools will bite and where will the staff and volunteers come from. Without unlikely active government backing big elements of the strategy rely on the co-operation of individual head teachers, schools and staff.

Campbell placed emphasis on the importance of selling women’s football to schools on their terms. Of showing how football can fulfil parts of the curriculum. While this will undoubtedly work with the most forward thinking heads, the grim reality is that the education system, funding and staffing are stretched to breaking point.

Already the number of schools in deficit has doubled since 2015 according to the National Association of Head Teachers. And school budgets face a real-terms cut of £3 billion over the next four years according to the latest National Audit Office report — the biggest in a generation according to teaching unions.

One devastating effect of the pressures piled on teachers as a result of these cuts is that the suicide rate among primary school teachers in England was shown by the Office for National Statistics to be nearly two times higher than the national average. With 70 per cent of heads now using agency staff and £1.3bn being spent on supply teachers as more and more drop out of the high-stress profession, finding staff willing to commit to the programme will be tough.

The state of PE is also a barrier to delivery. At the end of 2016 Lib Dem peer Floella Benjamin called for a national task force to “reset training for PE teachers.”

Benjamin sits on the all-party parliamentary group on a fit and healthy childhood, which pointed to the “urgent need to revise the teaching of PE, which has not changed since the 1940s, if PE is to play a part in children’s wellbeing,” in its last report.

She said: “There is no overall strategy for teachers to deliver PE, a subject often sidelined in the curriculum.” But her calls fell on deaf government ears.

All that said, this is a good time for the FA to try. After abolishing ring-fenced funding for the national school sport partnerships and ending the recommendation for two hours of PE in schools per week in 2013 — a move that was blasted as a failure to build on the Olympic legacy — the government seems to be making good on its promise to use sugar tax revenue for school sports.

Despite a shortfall in the amount ministers hoped to rake in from soft drink companies, as the firms scale back sugar content rather than shell out, the government has promised that the £1bn pledged for the length of this parliament will be found.

How that money is dished out and how much say schools have on where it goes remains to be seen, but if the FA are in the right place at the right time, catching schools as they look to use the funding promised, then there may be hope.

If pressure outside of sport weren’t enough of a hurdle, there are also big obstacles within the game itself too.

The importance of having FA Women’s Super League and FA Women’s Premier League clubs on side was made clear from the off. Avoiding club v country friction a la the men’s game is critical for the development of women’s football at the top level. It’s vital that the league’s development goes hand in hand with the progress of the national team.

But the progress of women’s clubs sides is rocky. While clubs like Manchester City, Chelsea, now Liverpool and historically Arsenal, have chosen to plough money and resources into their women’s teams, others have struggled.

Sunderland have reverted to part-time players, Notts County Ladies have had a winding up petition adjourned and clubs like Watford are struggling financially.

This uneven development has meant that a gap is opening at the top of a venture still very much in its infancy, one that risks affecting the competitiveness and attractiveness of the league — highlighted by the 10-0 and 7-0 drubbings handed out by Arsenal and Chelsea in the FA Cup fifth round at the weekend as every team in the WSL1 went through.

When questioned, Simmons was quick to agree that the funding model wasn’t perfect, but a sustainable WSL was a long way off: “We are investing alongside the clubs. The reality is women’s sides are funded by men’s professional clubs. With that comes risks.

“The ideal model would be that clubs are entities in their own right. We’re not there yet. I can’t see it in the next five years, that’s the reality of value and sponsorship.” But she also pointed to the huge strides taken over recent years resulting in an almost fully professional WSL1.

The struggle to bring clubs on board with the strategy, beyond just the women’s teams, is clear. The lack of a Manchester United senior women’s side was pointed to and Glenn, Simmons and Campbell all expressed disappointment, pointing out how United are a global force and that it would be good for the game, without revealing any pressures the club may be coming under to change track.

But England top-scorer Kelly Smith was less candid, blaming “the state of the game.”

She said: “Man United have maybe been left behind. It’s disappointing because they are still a big powerhouse within men’s football and for me it doesn’t make sense because they have youth programmes but not a women’s programme to go to so they are feeding their rivals. At some point they are going to realise that and hopefully set up a team in the future.”

Promises and plans have been made before. But this seems more serious, more thought-through and, despite the obstacles, there is an enthusiasm from such a range of stakeholders that you can’t help but think that maybe, this time, the progress of women’s football will take off.

I so want the Gameplan for Growth to work. It would be hard to sit in the Bobby Moore room at Wembley and listen to Smith say: “I felt neglected as a national team player. It brings a tear to my eye because I think I wish it was in place 10 years ago” and not desperately hope for it to be successful.

But hope isn’t enough, it needs relevant parties, including the media, to actively commit to its success so we can make the same toast the FA founders made that Glenn recited “to the success of football, irrespective of class or creed,” and mean it.