Collingwood believes it has a compelling case before the AFL for a licence in the proposed AFL women’s competition.

Collingwood president, Eddie McGuire, and chief executive, Gary Pert, used the occasion of the club’s 2016 season launch on Tuesday to outline how and why the club ought to be fielding a female team in 2017.

“We’re committed to being involved in women’s football,” said McGuire, who further explained that Collingwood’s new $25 million Glasshouse facility at the Holden Centre was, in part, designed with a female playing future in mind.

“This just hasn’t jumped out of the ground,” McGuire continued.

“We’ve been thinking about women’s football, women’s sport and passive recreation and safety for a long, long time.

“To build these facilities and have state-of-the-art facilities for a women’s football team and other forms of women’s recreation– it’s just a perfect situation for us.” 

Both Pert and McGuire believe the club is ideally placed to add a female team to the club’s strong history of ground-breaking initiatives.

Opened in October last year, The Glasshouse is already a popular event space among Collingwood players, staff and the club’s supporter base. It houses a gymnasium, change rooms, office and administration spaces,  social club facilities, a scoreboard, lights and coaches boxes that overlook Collingwood’s MCG-sized training ground in the Olympic Park precinct.

Pert sees a future where the Collingwood masses can take in a women’s match before and after Collingwood AFL matches played across the road at the MCG.

“The alignment is obvious,” Pert said.

“We have first class facilities already in place for our female players to train and play in, outstanding access and comfort for  fans to watch women’s football matches and the size, as a club, to make a female team work.”

In an interview on Fox Footy on the same night, Pert added: “We’ve been preparing for this since we built these facilities, and that happened three or four years ago.”

In the time since Collingwood conceived of The Glasshouse, the input by women in influential positions at the club has naturally grown.

Six years after Alisa Camplin was appointed to the Collingwood Board in 2009, the club announced its second female Board Member in Blackmores CEO, Christine Holgate.

VIDEO: 'Introducing out new board member' - Get to know Christine Holgate.

In addition to bringing a wealth of business experience and knowledge to the Magpies, Holgate joined the Board with a passion to develop women’s football.

“I am so pleased and so proud that Collingwood is a club who has really supported the development of women,” Holgate told Collingwood Media in February.

“I’d love for them to have a women’s AFL team.”

With the 2016 AFL home and away season ready to kick off, advancing the prospects of a Collingwood women’s team remains firmly on the agenda.

“It’s really important to us,” Pert said.

“We see that this is the future of the AFL and it’s the future of the Collingwood Football Club to have women involved at every level, in every role.”