“What we’re trying to do is use football to empower girls and women to take part in sport and through that change their confidence, their self-esteem and their ability to do well in life. I mean, it sounds very grand but that’s what we’re really trying to do.”

Baroness Sue Campbell is sitting in the cavernous Bobby Moore lounge at Wembley Stadium explaining the latest project that might seem impossible if it were not for the fact she is involved in it. The former PE teacher who became the head of UK Sport and oversaw Britain’s transformation into an Olympic superpower is now the Football Association’s head of women’s football and, among other things, aims to double participation in three years.

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The FA’s strategy for women’s and girl’s football, announced at the national stadium on Monday, may have three headline targets but really it is aiming for nothing less than a paradigm shift in the status of the sport. The targets are to double participation, double the number of fans and enable consistent success on the world stage, all by 2020. One imminent test of the strategy will be the 2017 Women’s European Championship this summer. Beyond that, however, there will also be 1,000 new clubs for primary school-aged girls, a network of coaching development established in association with universities and an integrated ‘talent pathway’ for those girls with the ambition to play professionally – not to mention the intended societal benefits. It is no small undertaking.

Investment in the women’s game has been described as offering the best return on the FA’s money by its chief executive officer, Martin Glenn. But there is clearly a sense of mission behind this new strategy, of finally grasping a missed opportunity. Glenn stopped short of apologising for the FA’s failure to develop the women’s game in decades past while rivals such as Germany and France rushed ahead but he did admit that “clearly, over the years, the FA has let down women’s football”. It would be hard to argue that there is a person more capable of redressing that historic slight than Campbell, a 68‑year‑old crossbench peer who walked into Gordon Brown’s office and promised 65 medals for Team GB at the London Olympics if he granted their budget request. (He did, and they did, to the medal.)

“When I came in last year I spent six months just listening, talking and asking what I’m sure a lot of people thought were a pile of dumb questions,” she says. “But really what I discovered was a massive amount of individual passion and effort and commitment. I called it the ‘women’s pioneers of football’. You know, there’d been such amazing work done. But there was no coherence and no real understanding of the big picture.”

“Being developmental” is what Campbell loves to do and implementing a bigger picture was what she set out to achieve. This meant working productively with county FAs and the Premier League, two opposite ends of the developmental spectrum and each with a reputation that precedes them. With the Premier League she offered to complement their ‘Premier Stars initiative’, which has funded football education in primary schools, by creating after-school clubs where girls could further pursue an interest in the sport (ages five to eight are seen as the key years for stimulating interest among girls in the sport). In turn these clubs are largely to be developed by county FAs.

Did Campbell find these notoriously conservative bodies to be a receptive audience? “I did, yeah,” she laughs. “The good thing about me coming into this is that I have no preconceived ideas about anybody. I’ve listened to a lot of stuff but I judge people in terms of the reactions I get and what they really enjoyed was being given a chance to pilot the scheme. They weren’t being given something and told, ‘This is what it looks like’, but rather, ‘This is what we want to do, tell me how you think this works best.’ It’s a collaboration, literally.”

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If the challenge of getting buy-in from schools is seen as the biggest facing the FA strategy and its chances of success, it is not the only one. Coaching and refereeing in the women’s game is also an abiding problem. “We have nothing like the numbers we need of women coaches, nothing like,” says Campbell. Despite the preponderance of male coaches in the Women’s Super League they too are absent at grassroots level. Campbell’s solution is to work with universities to develop coaching centres. “First of all, students are an enormous potential workforce for us,” she says. “Secondly, it gives us a hub which can work with a number of counties to pull together and provide a resource.”

Letters will go out to every university in England this week, inviting to apply to become one of 10 such facilities. “I’ve spent my life saying that sport can change lives and I think the brand of football can change many, many lives,” Campbell says of her broader ambitions for the women’s game. Almost one in five primary school leavers of both genders are obese, but Campbell believes emotional and mental pressures on young women are unprecedented. “If you look at emotional illness or mental health it’s in massive decline,” she says. “There’s a lot to do to provide young women with an opportunity to develop their social, emotional and physical wellness. I think football presented in the right way and delivered by the right people can have a huge impact.” She pauses. “I hope.”

As for herself, Campbell says she is always being asked when she plans to retire, but judging by the exhortations of Glenn and others at the strategy launch, there is a role for Campbell at the FA as long as she wants one. “I always believe that great development is making yourself redundant,” she says. “Great development in sport is about transforming a system so that it doesn’t need you. If it always needs you then you haven’t really changed the system. We’re putting a lot of new people in right now and at the point at which they’ve got hold of it, and are taking hold of it, then maybe the golf course will call.”