The Women’s Super League recommences on Sunday following its mid-summer break, with all those involved with the sport hoping England’s World Cup success immediately translates into more fans through the turnstiles.

In truth it will take very little to make a considerable difference. Last month the FA announced record crowds for the first half of the season, with average attendances of 892 in WSL1 and 326 in WSL2. This is welcome news – an increase of 8% and 12% over the same period last year and, overall, slightly ahead of the FA’s target – but the headlines tell only part of the story.

Played during the summer months, the WSL is the top tier of the woman’s game in England, but it contains only 18 teams in two divisions. The aggregate attendance each week across the whole league is only 5,198.

The minuscule number of spectators contrasts starkly with the number of players. For more than a decade women’s football has been the nation’s fastest-growing participation sport and, according to the latest FA figures, of the 11 million adults and children playing regularly, some 3.1 million are female. So why are almost none of these players becoming supporters?

The traditional audience for live football is predominantly male and a significant proportion remains entirely blind to the appeal of women’s football. That view is changing, but you do not have to speak to many male fans before egregious comparisons with the men’s game emerge: the old canards about poor goalkeeping, a lack of pace and physicality. These prejudices tend to be deep-seated and even a World Cup that saw England winning the third-place play-off over their nemesis Germany in a tournament that compares well with many moribund international ones of recent memory is unlikely to dispel them. Some men simply do not like the idea of women even playing football, let alone being good at it.

With that mindset, it seems logical that in the search for fans clubs should reach out to those millions of women playing the game regularly instead and indeed this does appear to be the case. Yet in many ways the challenge of winning over this audience is no less significant. For a start they are not watching matches at the moment and, as any marketing type will tell you, there is nothing more difficult than changing consumer behaviour.

The problem is men and women may well enjoy playing football as much as each other, but in other respects their relationship with the game tends to be completely different. Women are generally far less interested in the nerdier aspects that typify the hardcore male supporter: the obsession with stats, facts and figures relating to everything from appearances to – let’s face it – attendances. For example, the bestselling computer simulation Football Manager is an institution among football fans, selling 1.75 million copies a year, but barely 2% of those consumers are female.

Despite these issues there is evidence that a sizeable audience does exist. Armchair support for England during the World Cup semi-final peaked at 2.4 million viewers, while attendance for the national side’s most recent home game was 45,619: the equivalent of around half an entire season of WSL matches. The challenge is converting these passive national supporters into proactive fans of their local clubs.

With an average attendance of 1,303, Notts County are the best supported club in the WSL. The chief executive, Luke Negus-Hill, identifies “excellent media relations” as the key to this achievement. It is a view that is echoed again and again. The WSL’s newest club are Sheffield FC, who in May 2015 won the first Women’s Premier League play-off final. Their reward was the opportunity to apply for a WSL licence; promotion itself was only granted after the club’s sales and marketing plans had been formally approved.

Sheffield FC’s rise has been remarkable – from formation to WSL in little more than a decade – and one that is testament to the capabilities of their manager, Helen Mitchell, and the work of the chairman, Richard Timms. Yet this is a story that has played out almost entirely without an audience. To fulfil the WSL licence requirements the club must pull in at least 350 fans every week: around four times the WPL average.

Timms is optimistic and realistic about the club’s chances, “It’s an achievable target – it’s not like we’re being asked to pull 20,000,” he said. “We know from experience with our men’s side that when we get 400 people in our ground, the atmosphere is fantastic and everyone will say they’ve really enjoyed it, but it’s getting them to come back and support us every week that’s difficult. With a limited marketing budget, PR coverage is vital.”

The targets for this PR activity are the girls and women (along with their families) playing football in the Sheffield and Hallamshire League, the largest grassroots football league in Europe. Julie Higgins is the secretary of the women’s section which operates at every age group from under-9s to adult. “We’re hoping the World Cup will encourage more girls to start playing,” Higgins says. “Last season we were down to 112 teams in the junior section from a high of 160 a few years ago, but the senior section is growing and we’ll probably have between 1,500 to 1,800 players registered altogether.”

Higgins also runs Sheffield Wednesday Ladies, the league’s biggest club with more than 200 players. “Many girls join us because they support Wednesday or their families do and their aim is progress to the senior team, but that doesn’t really translate into support. Our first team play just below the WPL. It’s a good standard and free to watch, but it’s usually just family and friends who turn up.”

Despite laying claim to being the most successful women’s team of all time, Higgins’ experience is shared by Doncaster Rovers Belles, whose junior teams also compete in the Sheffield and Hallamshire League. Despite a good season on the pitch, Belles are falling just short of their WSL2 licence requirement with average crowds of 297. Faye Lygo, the Belles marketing director, says: “I can sum up the problems all women’s clubs face in just two words: communication and infrastructure.”

Lygo’s succinct summary gets to the heart of the matter. There is much to support the view that greater communication would help to unlock demand for watching women’s football. It has certainly transformed perceptions of the national team. However, many clubs are finding it very difficult to get any media interest at all. “Coverage makes a huge difference,” Lygo adds, “but getting sports journalists to engage with us is a struggle.”

This situation is compounded by the game’s structure: there is a startling lack of cohesion across women’s football. These problems begin at the top with the WSL itself and cascade downwards. The league’s format, with fewer than 10 home games and an extended mid-season break, discourages habitual attendance. Moreover, while the WSL has a summer season, the rest of the sport –from the second-tier WPL to grassroots’ under-9s – is played during the winter.

Anyone trying to navigate their way through women’s football will quickly finds it is completely disconnected. There are no channels of communication from the top down. Junior clubs are often completely separate entities to the seniors (as is the case with Belles). Neither Manchester City, Notts County, Sheffield FC nor Doncaster Belles have their own centre of excellence, while Manchester United, Sheffield United,York and Lincoln all have CoEs but no senior teams to feed the players they produce into.

The result is that few girls playing in junior leagues, or their parents, have any idea about the structure of the game beneath the England team. This makes it very difficult for them to find out about it, let alone follow it.

The outcome is a vicious circle: the clubs charge, almost certainly correctly, that more media support equals bigger attendances, while the media look at WSL figures and argue back that there is no demand.

The FA cannot control the media, but it could do more. Initiatives like streaming news and information about the WSL (and WPL during the winter months) through the local FA and club websites would be an easy, cost-effective way to raise awareness.

But what the women’s game really needs above all is a plan to bring its various disconnected parts together and enable them to work in concert. Until that happens it is likely to remain beyond the power of most clubs to turn those millions of female players into thousands of supporters.

• Steve McKevitt writes about marketing, communications and football. His latest book is Playing with the Boys: The Story of the Girl Footballer Who Took on the Boys at Their Own Game and Won