Manchester United's delay in establishing a senior women's team was down to a desire to do things properly, insists manager Casey Stoney.
Stoney, who won 130 international caps as a defender, left her post as assistant manager to Phil Neville at England to become the first coach of the Red Devils' newly formed women's team last summer.
United had scrapped their women's team amidst the Glazer family takeover in 2005 and, although they had maintained a female academy, they and Southampton were the only men's Premier League clubs without women's sides until this season.
That policy generated considerable controversy and criticism, not least from Stoney herself.
"It was one of my questions at the interview," she told RTÉ Sport at the launch of the 20x20 initiative to promote women's sport. "Why now? I was as critical as anyone else.
"But I get it now, because of the whole ‘we don’t do things unless we do things properly'. They don’t do anything by half measures.
"They wanted to take their time, it also came at a time when the FA restructured the league. You couldn’t enter at any point before that.
"They didn’t feel like they had enough staff. In the last four years they’ve added 70 staff to their infrastructure, which meant all of those staff could now support the women’s team.
"They had to have a whole restructure at the club so at the time they didn’t feel that they could resource it properly. When the restructure came in they were like ‘We’re in a place now to do it properly. We’ve got the infrastructure in place and we’re in a position where we can actually look after the team and integrate it.
"The biggest thing they said to me is ‘we want you to feel a part of the club and not apart from the club’."
Stoney's fully professional side play in the FA Women's Championship, one tier below the FA Women's Super League.
That was a conscious decision to give a team a chance to develop but they've already emerged as promotion contenders: they thumped Aston Villa 12-0 away in their very first fixture and are a point clear of Tottenham after five games.
"The club found out that they got the licence on 28 May. I got announced on 8 June pre-season started on 9 July. That gave us four weeks to recruit 21 players, six full-time staff, and put everything in place," explained Stoney.
"If we had gone in at the top league and got any of that wrong, it wouldn’t have looked great. Manchester United do everything properly so they’d rather make slow, conscious, right decisions than quick, bad, wrong decisions.
"We’ve gone in that league so we can get the processes right, the structure right. Also, to give the players a chance to bed in out of the limelight a little bit. Manchester United is a massive club. To give me a chance to get things right, and make mistakes. We’re going to make mistakes, it’s our first year.
"The club’s mantra was very much: we will crawl, we will walk and then we will run."
Manchester United Women play in the 12,000-capacity Leigh Sports Village, which they share with the club's U19 and U23 teams and second-tier rugby league side outfit Leigh Centurions, and are based at the men's former training ground The Cliff.
There are tentative plans for Stoney's side to play a game at OId Trafford but first she hopes to grow the fanbase at the suburban venue, which is about an hour's travel west from the city centre.
"My ambition is that we could potentially fill that one day. Then we go from there and we keep growing the fan base," she said.
"Until we grow the fan base to a point where we can potentially get a really good crowd, it’s (Old Trafford) not the right stadium for us.
"We will have a game on it this season I believe, which would be good. It will be interesting to see what kind of crowd we can draw if we do well at the end of the season. It’s in discussions at the moment."
⚽️⚽️⚽️ Three more goals, three more points for #MUWomen against Charlton! 👏 pic.twitter.com/gkC03XjM9x
— Manchester United Women (@ManUtdWomen) October 15, 2018
Relocation and education are two priorities in attempting to tap into their male counterparts' massive fan base in the city.
"We have quite a lot of people coming across that are genuine fans of both (men and women’s teams)," said Stoney.
"Our home ground is slightly far away from Manchester, so we need to move that closer to Manchester.
"We are new, so the awareness in raising the profile is going to be key. We need to keep winning.
"Not all the fans even know that we’re not in the top league. They’re asking ‘When are we going to win the Champions League?". We’ve got to get in that league first before we can even qualify!
"It’s hard to manage expectations when you go and win your first game 12-0. But that was an anomaly."
"We still need more women coaches but I understand why there’s not because it’s intimidating"
Under 50% (4 out of 11) of Super League managers are women. Stoney says that figure lags behind the lower tiers, which she suggests is borne out of both a reluctance to give higher-profile jobs to women, and their hesitancy in applying for them.
"We still need more women coaches but I understand why there’s not because it’s intimidating.
"I think there are willing candidates, it’s the club giving them the opportunity, the women being confident enough to put themselves forward.
"It’s almost when it’s lower down, clubs see it as taking less of a risk.
"I went up against outstanding candidates to get this job and didn’t dream that I would get it because of the candidates that were in the room. But with the project that it was and where I was coming from, it was a perfect fit.
"I had to go through quite a stringent interview process to get it, I didn’t get it just because I played for England or was coaching with England. I had to prove my worth. I’m confident at doing that but not everybody is the same as me."
