No one cares. That’s the constant refrain we hear about women’s football. Well, on Thursday night more than four million people cared enough to turn their TVs over to Channel 4 and watch England play the Netherlands in the semi-finals of the European Championships. Clare Balding, who hosted the coverage, tweeted that it marks the highest audience figures for the channel this year.

In our house, we joined them. I let my two young daughters stay up late to watch the match and, despite the 3-0 defeat, it was all my five-year-old wanted to talk about the next morning. My personal highlight of the evening was when Dele Alli came on TV and she shouted, “Look, Mummy! A boy playing football!” as though it was an unusual sight.

It isn’t, of course, but thankfully my daughters are growing up in an era in which women’s football is becoming more visible than ever. The Channel 4 viewing figures are not an anomaly. The previous week more than three million tuned in to watch England beat France in the quarter finals, a massive leap from the 2.4 million who watched the Lionesses come third at the World Cup in Canada two years ago.

If we look further afield to nations who have a longer, stronger, history of investing in the women’s game, the figures are higher still. In Germany seven million – a quarter of the entire TV audience that night – watched their women’s team beat Russia in the group stages, while over in the US viewing figures for the 2015 women’s World Cup smashed anything comparable for the men’s when 25 million Americans watched their team triumph in the final. Globally, 750 million people watched that tournament.

Dick, Kerr Ladies FC (1920-1921). Photograph: Pro Co

That’s an awful lot of interested people. For all the snarky comments and columns, the numbers matter. They show, despite the archaic opinions, that the tide is turning, and that the sport holds genuine commercial potential for sponsors to exploit. So when England manager Mark Sampson thanked the media in his final press conference of the tournament, his was no twee remark – it was recognition for the vital role that media coverage plays to a sport still fighting for its future. Because until crowds regularly turn out to watch league games, clubs will always have an excuse to offload their women’s sides when they start to feel the pinch.

Like Notts County, which disbanded operations days before the start of the spring season, leaving four England players adrift and, in the case of midfielder Danielle Buet, homeless. The chairman, Alan Hardy, said allowing the women’s team to continue would have been “financial suicide” (if only Neymar could have stepped in, his weekly wage would have covered Notts County’s running costs for the entire season).

I let my daughters stay up late to watch the match and it was all my five-year-old wanted to talk about the next morning

The thing is, women’s football isn’t – by definition – financial suicide. In the US the women’s national team outsell the men’s in gate receipts, and outperform them when it comes to incoming revenue. The difference is a cultural one, with an investment that stems back to 1972 and Title IX, the game-changing federal law declaring equal spending across education, including sport.

While women’s football in England has a longer history – the first recorded public women’s match took place in 1881, and crowds of 53,000 watched the Dick, Kerr Ladies in 1920 before the FA slapped a 50-year ban on the sport – proper investment has only really taken place in the last few years. The legacy of that chronic under-investment, of that outright hostility to women and girls accessing football spanning almost a century while the men’s game went from strength to strength, has been hugely damaging. It is testimony to the strength of spirit of so many women’s football pioneers that the game survived, and is bouncing back today.

In this new dawn, in the Women’s Super League, with the FA investing £17m into the sport this year, women’s football needs to become financially viable. If we can convert those television audiences into gate receipts we have a chance. But it’s not all down to external factors. The sport itself has work to do. It requires better marketing, watertight fixture lists, accessible grounds, sensible kick-off times, and a stronger grassroots movement. Baroness Sue Campbell was brought in last year to oversee the mission and a host of high-profile initiatives followed, including Little Mix supporting the Lionesses with a social media campaign. Only time will tell if Campbell can galvanise the resources at the FA to bring her vision to fruition.

When I was a kid I never had the chance to watch women play football – or many sports for that matter – on TV. The transformative power of accessing the game last night with my kids cannot be underestimated. And that memory will stick in my daughters’ minds the next time, and sadly there will be a next time, that someone tells them: “Girls can’t play football.” They can, and they do. These days all you’ve got to do is turn on your TV to watch them. But if we want them to stay on our screens we need to do more than just vote with our remote.

• Anna Kessel is a sports writer