Eugenie Le Sommer is no stranger to winning in football, but the Lyon and France goal machine reckons the change she has inspired off the pitch is her biggest victory yet.

Le Sommer has won everything there is to win with Lyon. Since joining the club in 2010, she has lifted the Division 1 Féminine title every year while also steering the French giants to six Champions League titles in the process.

If that wasn’t impressive enough, her feats on the international scene are arguably more remarkable, the striker being just one goal shy of surpassing Marinette Pichon (81) to become France’s all-time top scorer – that’s 30 goals more than Thierry Henry.

But for Le Sommer, those aren’t the figures that matter. She may be at the forefront of the French female football revolution now, but the 30-year-old hasn’t forgotten what it’s taken to get it this far.

“The first victory for me is that people know women can play football now, and that’s an important victory,” said Le Sommer, who was speaking at the Team Visa summit in London.

“I was always happy playing with boys, but the thing is that when you’re a girl and if you want to play with boys, you have to be good. If you’re not good, you can’t, and that’s the problem.

“With boys, it’s okay if they are bad, but a girl always needs to be good. Why is that?

“It’s the same problem when watching. I don’t understand why people speak s**t about women’s football. If you don’t want to watch, don’t watch it. Turn the TV off, change the channel.

“The same mistakes happen in both the men’s and women’s game. It’s all about education and culture. We’ve made progress but football is still the last sport girls are expected to play.”

From fighting her way onto boys’ teams to becoming somewhat of a poster girl for the French national team at the World Cup, Le Sommer, along with women’s football, has come a long way.

In fact, Le Sommer admits she’s come so far in the sport that scoring the tournament’s opening goal in front of a sold-out Parc des Princes is a feeling yet to properly sink in.

“It was always my dream to become a professional footballer, but I never imagined I would be doing so for my country at a home World Cup,” she added.

“It’s fantastic that young girls can watch us on TV and say I can become the next Eugenie Le Sommer. When I was young, I only had the men’s game. I loved Zinedine Zidane, but I had no women to look up to. The girls can dream now and we didn’t have that before.”

Le Sommer’s dream of emulating the success of Didier Deschamps’ 2018 World Cup winning side fell short as they crashed out at the quarter-final stage to eventual champions USA.

But with women’s football going from strength to strength on the European continent - the likes of Visa signing a seven-year deal with UEFA to sponsor all of their women's competitions - Le Sommer knows adding a World Cup title to her staggering Lyon tally is well within her reach.

“I think the next World Cup will be much harder for the USA,” she added.

“They’ve always been so far in advance but that’s because they had a different mentality. That’s gradually happening in Europe now too.

“The leagues are going professional now, fully in England and we’re halfway there in France. The next step in France is definitely a professional league."