Now here’s a thing. Of the 81 posts in the comments section of a recent football column on the Guardian website, more than 25% were deleted by moderators on the grounds that they “didn’t abide by our community standards”. Often a genteel way of saying they have been expunged for being excessively abusive or obnoxious, these purges are depressingly common “below the line” of articles posted on our football site, many of which tend to prompt comical levels of mouth-foaming among the more rabidly one-eyed and tribal supporters of assorted high-profile teams. The kind of super-fans who convey the impression they would do anything to support their team except attend an actual game, these keyboard warriors are surprisingly delicate souls who can be very easily riled. It should come as no surprise that the article in question was about Manchester City, one of several top-tier outfits whose mere presence in a headline can be enough to make the blood of many readers boil.

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Rather less predictably, the article that provoked so much reader opprobrium happened to be about the club’s women’s team and the outrage wasn’t so much down to anything contentious in the content, but prompted by the Guardian’s apparent determination to squander resources covering the women’s game at all. Assuming the same readers don’t feel the same compulsion to comment underneath articles about other sports they don’t care for, the only obvious conclusion to draw from their compulsion to denounce our coverage of women’s football is that they feel in some way threatened by the burgeoning popularity of a game that remains in no danger whatsoever of eclipsing the comparative box-office appeal of the testosterone-charged version they prefer.

We have been here before. In 1921, the fusty panjandrums on the Football Association council felt “impelled to express their strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”, before banning women from playing on the pitches of their member clubs. This sanction, which would last 50 years before eventually being lifted when the FA buckled under pressure from Uefa, came a few months after the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies – a team founded during the first world war by workers in a Preston munitions factory – had played at Goodison Park in front of a capacity crowd of 53,000, with a further 14,000 reported to have been locked outside.

Spurious allegations of financial impropriety by the FA suggested the real reason for their draconian ban was down to money. The blazers who implemented it were worried that the women’s game was getting a little too popular and were of a mind that the thousands of pounds being raised by the girls in gate receipts for injured war veterans, as well as other worthy causes, might be better served going into the coffers of those who ran the men’s game.

Hayes suggests it will be another generation before a woman is given the first opportunity to manage a men’s team

Since being granted permission to muddy their spats once again on the hallowed swards of FA member clubs in 1971, women’s football has come a long way, but those who play it continue to face an uphill battle for acceptance almost half a century later. Off the field, more encouragingly, the preponderance of women working in the media as presenters, journalists, commentators and – more recently – pundits, many of whom even seem to have a basic grasp of the offside law, tends to prompt audible mutterings of discontent from only the most Neanderthal of Proper Football Men.

Famously audible, of course, in the case of Richard Keys and Andy Gray, whose belittlement of assistant referee Sian Massey-Ellis resulted in their famous banishment to the haven of equality and enlightenment that is Doha. There, without a trace of self-awareness, they while away most of their air time Jurassically barking about how unjust it is that foreigners keep pitching up in England to take the jobs of more qualified locals.

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One can’t help but wonder what Richard, Andy and other like-minded individuals would make of comments made by Emma Hayes, head coach of Chelsea Women, who believes “a woman coaching in the men’s game is not going to be easily achieved, but the interesting thing about it, for me, is that it is absolutely needed”. Speaking to Michael Calvin for State of Play, his latest investigation into the often murky recesses of football, Hayes suggests it will be another generation before a woman is given the first opportunity to manage a men’s team in the English league and the first since Cherie Lunghi shattered the glass ceiling in the 1980s TV series The Manageress. Hayes simultaneously conveys the impression she could probably do so now but just doesn’t particularly want to.

“I am at a great club and have everything I need,” the 41-year-old tells Calvin, who reports that David Luiz and Eden Hazard are regular interested observers at her coaching sessions. “I don’t think I’m going to be moving to Grimsby, just to get into the men’s game. Am I going to leave for a ninety grand contract somewhere, with an average shelf life of six months? I’m not going to rush.”

Hayes stresses the need for empathy in football management and has said that she tells any man who comes to work for her that her first job is to make him a better husband. Compare and contrast with a certain Manchester United manager who in recent weeks publicly excoriated an employee for abandoning his post to spend time with his partner when she gave birth to the couple’s son. Should the vacancy arise, in common with Hayes, José Mourinho is unlikely to take the job at Grimsby. Wouldn’t it be great if one of them did, if only to see the internet explode and find out what would happen next?