Scotland plans to double female players and quadruple crowds by 2035. The first £250,000 is warming up.

The Fan has found a national football plan with an actual scoreboard. This is already unusual. Most strategies arrive with a vision, a stakeholder and a photograph of somebody pointing at a cone. Project 2035 has numbers big enough to argue with.

Published by the Scottish Government on Wednesday morning, the plan aims to double registered female players from 28,000 in 2025–26 to 56,000 by the 2035–36 season. It also wants combined attendance at Scottish Women’s Premier League, Scottish Women’s Football and Scotland national-team matches to rise from 80,000 to 320,000.

The screen audience is meant to make the same fourfold jump, from 1.2 million broadcast or streaming views to 4.8 million. Those are targets rather than forecasts. Nobody has observed the 2035 crowd arriving from the future with a pie and a scarf. The plan is setting the score it wants Scotland to chase.

There is a football target as well as a participation target. Scotland’s women are supposed to qualify regularly for major tournaments and get beyond the group stage at least once at a Women’s World Cup during the project. The Fan has checked: ‘at least once’ is cautious government language for ‘please let us have a knockout match before the next decade ends’.

Project 2035 also promises more female coaches, match officials and decision-makers, better safeguarding, stronger commercial income and a more sustainable game. Unlike the player and audience goals, those workforce and revenue ambitions do not yet come with published numerical targets. The scoreboard has three illuminated panels and several sockets awaiting bulbs.

The Scottish Government is putting in £250,000 for 2026–27. It says the money will support elite pathways, safety and wellbeing work, participation pilots, early-years development and efforts to build the SWPL fanbase. That is opening-season funding, not a stated nine-year budget. The ambitions are long-term; the cheque currently covers the first huddle.

A Girls’ and Women’s Football Taskforce is due to oversee delivery from December. Its partners include the Government, Scottish FA, Scottish Women’s Football, the SWPL, PFA Scotland, sportscotland and Cosla. Ministers promise progress reports and published taskforce minutes. Football governance has entered a dangerous new era in which somebody may eventually be asked what the table says.

The starting point is not imaginary. Scottish FA figures published in April put registered participation at 28,273, up 23% in two years, while interest in the women’s game had risen sharply since 2020. The new plan rounds that baseline to 28,000 and asks the system to double it. Growth has supplied momentum. Facilities, volunteers, coaches and regular fixtures will have to supply the rest.

Scottish Women’s Football called the taskforce a gamechanger, while the SWPL said the project could drive attendances, jobs and investment. Those are partner endorsements, not independent guarantees. The useful test will come when progress reports show whether participation is spreading beyond headline clubs and whether the extra audience becomes dependable income.

For now, Project 2035 deserves credit for putting figures beside the optimism. Double the players. Four times the crowd. Four times the viewers. One World Cup knockout run. The Fan has pinned the targets above the turnstile and begun the longest pre-match buildup in Scottish football. Kick-off is December. Full time is nine seasons away.