Those previously exclusively for women - most obviously netball and those in which both males and females have engaged alongside each other long term like basketball and hockey should be fine.

The women's codes in each have long histories, established structures and embedded relationships with their fraternities, the general community and venue operators.

And importantly they each have either their own finances or equal access to internal and external funds across their sports.

Perhaps soccer and cricket will also be okay. The women's game in each has been around for a long time, even if they have professionalised only recently and developed stand-alone leagues in their own right.

The comparative advantage they have is that the skill levels of their top players have risen quickly and their televised matches have become attractive to a range of viewers.

And at least the most elite players in both sports have been able, surprisingly, to extract pretty respectable remuneration and contract deals from their governing bodies

But for the other football codes, the forecast is hardly rosy.

The news in Tasmania that North Launceston is likely not to field a team in the highest level women's competition in the state in 2021 is reflective of the problem.

That at the top national level in women's rugby league, the season still only extends for a handful of weeks indicates expectations of a much grander vision are a long way off.

For the Australian Football League, the timing of the next step in its highly subsidised expansion of its women's competition - the AFLW - was unfortunate.

Additional teams, the expectation of more games and a longer season just don't fit well within the national budget for the game when it has taken such a hit from the impact of the pandemic.

There's no question that the AFL managed 2020 very well. But the women's season was already over by the time COVID hit and the men's was curtailed in so many ways, not the least of which in the budgetary sense.

The North Launceston story will be typical of the situation all over the country - whether it's natural AFL or NRL territory.

At local and state level most women will have been playing for nothing, except the love of the game, though perhaps with some expectation that they could be drafted - but even there the wages are nothing flash.

Yet they are expected to make a similar commitment to their male counterparts in terms of training and game days.

In return they have some expectation of a quality training and competition environment, but therein lies the problem, for there is a significant cost to all of that, and the money has to come from somewhere.

Just from where that might be right now is a massive question.

In these sports, state controlling entities are either dependent on the national governing bodies or are simply a part of them. The latter is now very much the case for AFL in Tasmania.

There's essentially only one pool of money to be divided up depending only on how the contributions from state and territory governments are managed.

The men's game and to a lesser extent programs like Auskick are entrenched. When funds are short they will fight hard to retain as much of the share of the pie to which they have become accustomed.

Many of the niceties willingly extended to the jenny-come-latelies of the women's game over the past few years may now be withdrawn.

This is battleline stuff and it doesn't look good for the women.

The North Launceston female players expressed the view that they should not have to be fundraisers for their club in order to access quality training environments.

Based on the way the new women's team sports have evolved that's not an unreasonable expectation.

In most other sports, as with the males, female participants pay their registration and their weekly entry or game fees to cover training and competition costs.

The difference is that in AFL, beyond under age competitions, it doesn't operate this way. Registration fees are rarely paid and in many cases it's been the other way around in terms of cash flow.