Colin Lowe, a football coach in Manchester, often receives calls from women in the area keen to join his new grassroots team. But when one woman called last week to ask where the team trained, he couldn’t give an exact answer. “I said to her: I’ll ring you back next week and let you know where we’re playing, because we’re struggling to find places to play.’”

Lowe’s problem is one affecting grassroots women’s football teams across the country. The number of girls and women taking up the sport has skyrocketed since the Women’s World Cup, with 605 new girls’ youth teams and 260 new women’s clubs registered to play this season. But grassroots teams say the lack of affordable and accessible pitches has made it a struggle to establish themselves or grow to meet increasing demand.

Last year, Lowe, the 49-year-old chairman and coach of Longford Park, invited mothers who were standing on the sidelines and cheering their children on to try out for a women’s team. Word and enthusiasm for the new team quickly spread and Longford Park Ladies now have 40 players. While it was relatively easy to find players, finding a space for the team to train has been a nightmare.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest England’s Ellen White scores against the USA in the 2019 World Cup semi-final. Women’s participation has skyrocketed since the tournament. Photograph: Alex Grimm/Getty Images

“We’ve got nowhere at the moment, we’re struggling,” Lowe said. “It’s a tricky one because the men have been established now for so many years, but all of a sudden in the last four years there’s huge growth [in women’s football].” The local affordable pitches are all booked up, he explained, forcing women to chose between travelling far or paying more than £100 an hour to use private 4G astroturf pitches.

Lowe said teams such as his have to settle for playing on hockey pitches for matches and training, much to his dismay. “There’s no control with the football … And when it rains, you haven’t got a chance. There’s no point in being there. It’s daft. It’s not football is it?” he said.

Naomi Short, 41, who helps coach a girls’ team and set up a women’s team in Trafford, said the only slot the team could train on the local pitch was between 9.15pm and 10.15pm on a weeknight because more established teams block-book pitch space for weeks at a time. “I’ve played football since I was five years old and there is so much more available today than there was then, but the pitches do get booked out far too quickly and we have a lot of mums on our team who can’t train at odd hours,” she said. Eventually, she joined Longfield Park Ladies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Naomi Short: ‘The pitches do get booked out far too quickly.’ Photograph: Joel Goodman/The Guardian

Goal Diggers, one of London’s biggest grassroots football teams open to women and non-binary players, said they have to cap training at a local school to 60 players and spaces can go within minutes. Fleur Cousens, who founded the team four years ago, said she has been looking for bigger pitch space in Hackney and Islington for three years, but the search has become more desperate over the past few months.

“Every night of the week there’s a men’s 11-a-side league that dominates those spaces and that’s 22 men using it,” Cousens said. “I think the fact the space is only being used by men needs to change … it makes it seem those spaces are masculine.”

Ian Bruce, the chairman of AFC Stoke Newington in north London, said in general there were not enough green spaces to play football, affecting new girls’ and boys’ teams as well as disability teams. “It’s a huge problem in a city like London and we need to start asking how to better distribute pieces of land that can be used to better serve the community,” he said.

Cousens accepts that while the booking systems are not trying to be discriminatory, they have to account for the fact that from 1921 to 1971, women were banned from playing on Football Association pitches and have long been widely discouraged from taking part in the sport. “We’re playing catch-up on space that has been taken by men,” she said.

She called on councils to implement fundamental changes to their booking systems for pitch space, such as having one night in the week that is only open to women’s groups. As for the FA, a spokesperson said it was aware of issues relating to pitch allocation and was working with the Football Foundation “to deliver approximately 400 new pitches over the next three years”.

Despite the difficulties of getting on a pitch, Christina Philippou, 37, a university lecturer, said she had been taken aback by the interest in the local women’s football team she set up in Guildford, Surrey. “Despite the fact it’s a pretty crap slot, training on a Sunday evening, it’s been amazing how many people continue to turn up. I’ve been really surprised by the demand, but there seems to be a gap in the market there,” she said.

Nicky Ellison, an adult careers adviser, said the lack of pitch space meant she had an uphill battle in developing women’s football in Bournemouth, Dorset. “I’m going to have to start my own five-a-side league, but before we even get to that point, just training on a normal pitch is impossible,” she said. The team she set up plays at the local YMCA and though the facilities are not big enough, it is all they can afford.

Ellison is determined to set up an accessible and affordable league despite the challenges, saying that she has seen women transform through playing with the team. “I think sometimes women focus on their families and other supporting other people, and they don’t do something for themselves, and I think we can do more to encourage that in this country,” she said.