Women’s football in England takes a great leap forward on Sunday when the WSL kicks off. Advocates of a radically restructured competition, featuring a fully professional 11-team elite division, speak of the project with a sort of evangelism but sceptics fear clubs folding against a backdrop of stubbornly low crowds.

While this bold project remains fragile, its principal architect, the Football Association’s head of women’s football, Baroness Sue Campbell, is undeterred. She is convinced the potential rewards not only outweigh the risks but have the potential to change the entire English footballing landscape almost beyond recognition.

The challenge is to shift interest in the women’s game from niche to mainstream. With the product on the pitch now frequently high-calibre, leading players and coaches such as Steph Houghton and Emma Hayes quickly becoming household names and England among the favourites to win next summer’s World Cup in France, the timing is surely ideal.

The test will not merely be capturing the country’s collective imagination but retaining it. There is a tactically intriguing title battle in prospect, involving not just the holders Chelsea and Manchester City – who meet at Kingsmeadow on Sunday – but Arsenal too, which looks capable of winning hearts and minds. Caveats lurk, however.

While an 11-club lineup gives the Super League an awkward look – and leaves West Ham without a fixture at Sunday’s big kick-off – a worrying geographical imbalance means it contains no team north of Manchester.

Drive for two and a half hours north-east from City’s Etihad campus, through what is now at risk of becoming an elite female footballing wasteland, and you arrive at Sunderland. There, the club’s ladies team have developed leading internationals, including Houghton, Jill Scott (now at City), Jordan Nobbs (Arsenal) and Lucy Bronze (Lyon). That quartet are the nucleus of Phil Neville’s England team but, despite finishing seventh in last year’s Super League, the club that honed them have been demoted two divisions by the FA’s radical restructure. Unwilling to fund a fully professional squad, Sunderland, whose last published accounts show losses of £424,000, did not apply for a top-flight licence and were not even granted a slot in the semi-professional Championship.

West Ham, meanwhile, have been catapulted up two tiers into the WSL where their opponents will, bizarrely, include Yeovil. Despite finishing bottom of the top flight and scoring only two goals all season, the Somerset side benefited from a temporary suspension of relegation and, thanks to a crowd-funding initiative, raised sufficient cash to persuade the FA to allow them to remain in the rebranded top division.

Unlike Yeovil, most leading teams are heavily subsidised by their male parent clubs. Everton Ladies have recently made small profits but wider sustainability is necessary if this fully professional division is to endure and the salary for a non‑international player is to rise from a rough average of around £35,000 a year.

Achieving that is the task of Kelly Simmons, the FA’s new director of the women’s professional game. “It’s been very hard for women’s sports to break into the mainstream,” she says. “But I think women’s football can be that breakthrough sport, getting exposure on a weekly basis, not just once every four years at World Cups.

“I believe there will be brands who want to help make that happen and one of my big priorities is to secure title sponsorship for the WSL. We need to help teams become commercially sustainable, get more of their own revenue streams and pull down that reliance on men’s grants.”

Increased crowds are imperative. Last season’s switch from a summer to a winter game saw attendances drop 11% to an average of 953 per match – although Chelsea managed double that and Manchester City were not too far behind – but the good news is that marketing experts have plenty to work with.

An Arsenal side with two of the most gifted midfielders in the world – Scotland’s Kim Little and England’s Nobbs – have the ability to challenge both Chelsea and a City side stung by last season’s unexpected lack of trophies. While Joe Montemurro, Arsenal’s manager, hopes to become the first Australian coach to win a WSL title, his compatriot, Tanya Oxtoby, newly in charge of Bristol City, is one of four female managers in this season’s top tier.

The others are Chelsea’s Hayes, Kelly Chambers, quietly building an excellent Reading side capable of disrupting the established order, and Hope Powell, the former England manager now leading promoted Brighton. Hayes, back on the touchline four months after giving birth to a son, possesses an outstanding CV but her would-be successors could be threatened should Neil Redfearn succeed at Liverpool.

A much-admired former manager of Leeds at Championship level, Redfearn has become the first former Football League manager to work in the women’s professional game. His Doncaster Rovers Belles side won WSL 2 in May and should he prosper it is easy to envisage more WSL clubs following Liverpool’s lead, and in effect blocking opportunities for women. Conversely, Powell and Oxtoby, whose teams meet at Brighton on Sunday, hope professionalism will help redress the gender imbalance.

If the shift to full-time football will not suit every player – Brighton’s Vicky Ashton-Jones has departed for Gillingham as she did not want to give up her career as a police officer for an infinitely less secure, shorter-term job – it can only raise playing standards. Not to mention fulfilling what once seemed impossible dreams. “Previously we’d be training until 10pm and then be up early the next day for work or university,” says the Brighton midfielder Kirsty Barton. “I never thought football would be my job.”