The Women's World Cup final is a watershed moment for women's team sport.

The Women’s World Cup final may have ended in disappointment for the Lionesses, but England’s overall performance in the tournament – and the way the players and coach captured the imagination of the public and the media – was yet another watershed moment for women’s team sport.

A global TV audience of 263 million for the final and blanket coverage in the sports pages would have been unthinkable even a decade ago, when elite female team sports struggled to be taken seriously and a professional women’s football league was still a pipedream.

Now, even the Football Association, the organisation that banned women’s football in England until I was eight years old because it was deemed ‘unsuitable for females’, is talking seriously about Lionesses coach Sarina Wiegman being a potential replacement for the England men’s manager, Gareth Southgate. Am I dreaming this? ?

The surge in popularity of women’s sport is not just confined to football. Women’s rugby union and cricket have pulled in record TV viewing figures this summer for the Women’s Six Nations Championship and the women’s Ashes and Hundred cricket series – as has the Netball SuperLeague.

And as well as the Lionesses, the England Roses netball team reached the Netball World Cup final for the first time in history this month, while the GB women’s wheelchair basketball team won silver at the European Championships just a few days ago.

As someone who has been longstanding advocate of greater diversity and inclusion in the automotive and mobility industry, I can see some interesting similarities in the way more and more women are stepping into senior leadership roles in what was previously a male-dominated sector.

The rise of elite female sport did not just happen overnight. Investment, mainly through sponsorship, has enabled athletes to train professionally, raising performance standards and, in turn, driving public and media interest.

In a similar way, many of the women who are now stepping into senior leadership roles in automotive were identified as potential leaders a decade ago and the support and development that was put around them then is now bearing fruit.

The hope for women’s sport is that the successes we have seen this summer will encourage more girls to pursue their sporting dreams. By the same token, the visibility of women in senior roles in the automotive and mobility sector can only help to attract more young women into the industry.

Team sport, where success comes from having the right strategy and ensuring the entire team buys into it and executes it, has obvious parallels with the commercial world, and there are plenty of examples of retired elite athletes swapping the changing room for a career in motivational speaking and business performance coaching.

If Sarina Wiegman doesn’t become the new Gareth Southgate and one day chooses to apply her knowledge beyond sport, there is a lot the business world could learn from her leadership – her agility in changing formations to solve particular problems, her coolness under pressure and her ability to get a group of women who were not the most technically gifted footballers in the world to become greater than the sum of their parts and to buy into her ideas and vision.

Unfortunately, not even Wiegman’s leadership skills were enough to overcome the supremely talented Spanish team, but she and her players can take great pride from what they have done for their sport and the girls who aspire to be the next generation of Lionesses.