Junior League in the north-east will lead the way | Plan has support from inside the FA - and others seem sure to follow

The Premier League and Football Association gave no ground last week to the idea being discussed by Michel Platini, the Uefa president, with Fifa, of moving professional football to the summer months. Yet this week promises a landmark move to summer football at the English game's grassroots, which is expected to herald a gradual move for the game out of the winter wind, snow and rain.

On Wednesday, representatives of the 150 teams in the Russell Foster Tyne and Wear Youth League will decide whether to change their season to begin on 1 June, starting this year. John Topping, secretary of the Durham FA and a national FA Council member, expects the clubs to approve the switch by an overwhelming majority, and become the first league to move to summer football.

There is, he says, widespread frustration with bitterly cold winters that are disrupting almost all matches between November and February. Topping has received encouragement from FA headquarters at Wembley, where officials have told him that establishing summer football for children playing under-seven, under-eight and under-nine mini-soccer will inform a bigger debate about moving the season for youth football.

"It's simply common sense," Topping argues. "In effect we are having a winter break anyway, but it isn't planned and children are becoming very frustrated by games being called off week after week. This is about improving the experience of football for the young people who play it.

"Through the summer matches go ahead, people are all in shorts and T-shirts, the pitches are in good condition, the whole atmosphere is completely different and more pleasant. I think there will be a general move towards summer football and I would love to see it happen in 11-a-side."

Officially the FA are not backing summer football for any level above mini-soccer – the six- and seven-a-side form of the game played by children up to the age of 11. Mini-soccer, as well as the women's game and five-a-side, are exempted from the "close season" rule that no organised football can be played in June. However, county football associations are free to sanction 11-a-side matches in June if they see fit, following a recent significant amendment to the rules, and Topping believes the past two cold winters have made it inevitable that more football in England will shift into the more agreeable climes of summer.

While in the Premier League this season, critical attention has focused on the absence of a £1m undersoil heating system at Blackpool's Bloomfield Road, Topping points to the practical problems faced by the grassroots game. In the real world of municipal playing fields, many of which are mudbaths in winter and have no changing rooms, let alone undersoil heating, Topping says his league lost 14 weeks of football to the weather last season. This season, the Tyne and Wear league has played just one full programme of matches since 21 November.

The plan that Topping will back on Wednesday is to begin the mini-soccer season on 1 June this year, and run until the onset of true winter at the end of November. The league will then take a break, and begin again in mid-February, finishing by the end of April.

Although mini-soccer has never been bound by the "close season" rule, the Tyne and Wear League is, says Topping, the first to make the move to a summer start. Topping believes that summer sports including cricket, played by many of the same children who play football in the winter, will be able to accommodate the change, as they often start in the afternoons, while mini-soccer is played from 9am to noon.

Although the FA are not supporting a move of senior football out of the bleak midwinter, the Women's Super League, a professional competition that will launch in April, will be played through the summer. The arguments for it, that pitches will be better and the game more appealing both to players and spectators, apply equally to men's football, and so the argument will inevitably gather momentum for the senior 11-a-side game.

Wider moves of the sport to the summer, particularly if it were seriously suggested for the professional game, would meet intense opposition from cricket, tennis, athletics and other sports that currently have their moments in the sun during the months when football is not played.

A similar change is on the way in grassroots rugby league. The game at that level has more than 170,000 players, and the RFL are proposing a switch, from next year, to a summer-based season.

Uefa distanced themselves from last week's reports that Platini has been seriously discussing with Fifa the potential for moving football to the summer.

"Any decisions regarding the international match calendar are a matter of concern for the entire football family, therefore any discussions on this subject would naturally involve all of these parties," Uefa said in a statement. "However there are currently no concrete plans to revise the international match calendar."

And in that, particularly the word "concrete", many in football see some wriggle room.