Sadleir told The Telegraph that she had held regular crisis meetings with FIFA's chief women’s football officer Sarai Bareman and the ICC chief women’s cricket officer Holly Calvin since COVID-19 shut down global sport.

“We are sharing ideas and supporting each other," she said.

"We have spent quite a bit of time talking about the implications for women’s sport and what they are currently doing. No one six months ago, thought we would be in this situation and now is time for leaders in women’s sport to step up.”

The discussions are aimed at formulating a joint strategy to counter a severe dip in women's sport participation following the pandemic, with all three sports fearing a lack of grassroots numbers could have a leading impact on the future of female sport going forward.

“Things will be different. The reality is that people are going to have different priorities in terms of how they spend their discretionary time for a period of time after this.

“That is what I think is going to be different. We won’t be able to say we have 2.7 million women participating in rugby; it just won’t be the same."

Sadleir said that World Rugby had been looking towards FIFA's planned support for member federations and grassroots programs as a possible solution to roll out across other major sports.

“Hopefully what we do over this time is to work together on some solutions to make sure that different is good as opposed to a disaster but we will just have to work through that with the people we invested in," she continued.

“We are also sharing a lot more resources.

"I had a look at something FIFA had sent through in terms of what they are rolling out in new support programmes for federations and unions that is going to happen regardless of this situation."