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The European Championship win in July ended England’s 56-year wait for a major tournament victory and likely changed the face of women’s football in this country for ever. But how do you reflect on a gamechanging year when you are so close to it? Can you really determine whether it will have a seismic impact?

Looking back at the 1999 Women’s World Cup in the USA, where the hosts won their second title in front of what was a record crowd of 90,185 at the Rose Bowl, it is easy to say that was a moment of qualitative change in the development of women’s football in the United States. It transformed it and elevated the women’s game beyond what was thought achievable. The legacy of that game stands in a further two World Cup wins, back-to-back in 2015 and 2019.

If the seed was planted with the team’s first World Cup win in 1991, the seedling broke ground in 1999 and by 2015 the oak tree was mature and heading for the skies. It has been a somewhat linear process, albeit fraught with all the pitfalls and hurdles synonymous with women’s sports throughout history – underinvestment, undervaluing, inequity, sexism, misogyny, abuse.

In England, the seeds have been sown over and over. In the late 1800s, when Nettie Honeyball helped found the British Ladies Football Club; during the first world war, when women working in factories to aid the war effort formed teams. Each time the ground has been turned over, the seeds have been starved of the resources needed for them to grow – in the case of the latter, the roots would be cut away too, in the form of a close-to 50-year ban on women’s football from all Football Association-affiliated clubs and grounds when games were attracting crowds of up to 53,000.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s the pioneers of the game carried the seeds of the homeless game in pots and demanded Fifa, Uefa and federations found places for them to be planted safely. The ban on women’s football was lifted in 1970, but the fight was far from over – then it was for water, compost, light, gardeners, protection … perhaps this analogy has gone too far now.

The point is that we can look at the Lionesses’ historic first major trophy at the Euros in the summer and recognise it as the seedling’s breaking-ground moment because of what has come before. Because of the patterns within the game’s development.

Everything that fell into place in July was the culmination of decades and decades of work. In March 2017, the FA chief executive, Martin Glenn, apologised for the ban on women’s football and said the FA had “let down” the women’s game. He and the director of women’s football for the governing body, Baroness Sue Campbell, unveiled a “gameplan for growth” that would map out their plans for the development of the game with the FA invested and on board. In that document, alongside promises to double participation and double the fanbase, was the target of winning a major tournament by the 2021 Euros (that Covid would push back to 2022) or the 2023 World Cup.

This Euros win was not a chance one. It was a built-for win. The puzzle pieces had to go together in the right order, but they were all there, carefully crafted one by one. By the time they were 10 months away from the Euros the FA had the final piece. The arrival of the Dutch manager Sarina Wiegman, who guided the Netherlands to a home Euros win in 2017, was an extraordinarily astute appointment. She was the manager needed to pull together the team, the infrastructure and the resources and give everyone the belief that they could take the final step up after three consecutive semi-final exits.

Nothing is a given in sport, the teams with the best investment and with the biggest support structures around them will have the best chances of success. But the beauty of football is that the underdog always has a chance, no matter how slim, so success for the Lionesses was far from guaranteed.

England, like any tournament-winning side, were not without a heavy helping of luck too – the team’s mid-tournament Covid absences were not too disruptive, and they did not suffer a big injury blow like other contenders did. Spain lost Alexia Putellas to an ACL injury on the eve of the tournament, Marie-Antoinette Katoto suffered the same injury mid-tournament with France and Germany’s Alexandra Popp injured her hamstring in the warm-up before the final.

The pressure on the Lionesses to succeed on home soil was immense. All the work and resources that had been poured into the development of women’s football in England demanded success. Major tournaments have time and again prompted huge boosts to the interest in women’s football and winning a tournament was the next logical step for a team whose success had very much been achieved after the odds had been against them for so long. The global game would benefit from a successful tournament too. Europe is leading the charge – seven of the eight teams competing in the quarter-finals of the 2019 World Cup were European.

England’s charge to the final was in part because Wiegman had cultivated an environment that cut the team off from outside pressures, keeping them insulated from the noise as it built after each win.

Such was the team’s dominance, after the edgy 1-0 defeat of Austria at Old Trafford in the opening match, that the noise and expectations built quickly and, by the time of the final, there was a real feeling that, win or lose, the tournament would be a game-changer. Win, though, and the nature of the change would be accelerated beyond what was imaginable.

Now, the Lionesses are household names. Three documentaries have come out in quick succession charting the team’s journey. Their faces stare out from fashion and pop culture magazines and the front pages. They are guests on quiz and panel shows. And with each fresh appearance the message they deliver is the same: they want to grow the women’s game and make sure girls have equal access to football. In part, the success of women’s football is due to that – everyone singing from the same sheet, delivering the same message … watering the same tree.

Got a question for our writers – or want to suggest a topic to cover? Get in touch by commenting below the line or emailing moving.goalposts@theguardian.com.