IT is almost too ridiculous to believe. A new Holyrood group is established to look at ways of improving access to Scottish football. The group says it will consider how to encourage more people to take part in the game and make it more attractive for minority groups. MSPs are chosen from the four main parties and then they announce the line-up: the parliamentary group aimed at improving access to football “for all” will be made up entirely of men.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that it has happened this way. With several extremely impressive exceptions – including Ann Budge, the owner of Hearts, and Leeann Dempster, the Hibernian chief executive – the hierarchy of Scottish football is still overwhelmingly male. There is also still a widespread perception, held mainly by men, that football is a man’s game, watched by men and best understood by men and the appointment of an all-male line-up to the new Holyrood group will do absolutely nothing to change that.

The membership of the group looking at The Future of Football in Scotland also reflects a problem in parliament. In 2003, 51 women were elected to Holyrood, making up 39.5 per cent of the seats, but since then the female membership of the Scottish Parliament has been heading in the wrong direction – in 2016, the percentage of women elected was 34.9 per cent, the same as 2011. Female MSPs could easily have been found for the football group, but sadly there are fewer to choose from.

The all-male line-up also defies what is actually going on in football. Female involvement in schools football and the grass-roots of the game is no longer unusual – and hasn’t been for 20 years. The women’s game in Scotland and the UK is also thriving. Indeed, the Scottish women’s team has qualified for Euro 2017, their first major tournament, and as such has been performing relatively better than the men’s team.

However, if the momentum is to continue and more women are to take part in football, or go along to games, then several things need to change. First, the women’s game needs to be supported further, and the fact that the Scottish Government has announced more funding for the national women’s football team will help. It means the squad can now train full-time in the lead-up to those Euro championships later this year.

But the still persistent assumption, demonstrated by the Holyrood group, that football is essentially a man’s game also has to change and that can only happen when more women are appointed to senior roles and the women’s game is promoted much more than it is. It is easy to forget women’s football was extremely popular before the Football Association in England suppressed it by banning it from all their grounds in the 1920s.

Almost a hundred years on, the opposite could be true. If the football authorities in the UK did more to promote women’s football, it could be much more popular than it is. That, in turn, would attract more women into all levels of the game, on the terraces and in the boardrooms. And, in time, who knows, perhaps we might even see a parliamentary group about football that has just as many female members as male.