Sports Minister Tracey Crouch has backed the Football Association's plan to sell Wembley so it can accelerate plans to transform grassroots facilities over the next 20 years.
Speaking at a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee hearing on the proposed sale of the stadium to Fulham and Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, Crouch said the Government's support was conditional but made it clear she believed those conditions would be met.
Asked by MPs on the panel if she could be confident the FA would spend the Wembley windfall on tackling the poor state of grassroots facilities, Crouch said: "There will be legal guarantees about how the money is spent, absolutely. There will be protections in place.
"This cash injection means we can start to build the facilities and play good quality football to create better talent for the future.
"The Government invested money into Wembley and we want to ensure that the public money is safeguarded."
Crouch was seated to the right of FA chief executive Martin Glenn, with Sport England chairman Nick Bitel to Glenn's left.
The sight of the three of them fielding the MPs' questions about the proposed sale was the clearest indication yet that the FA has the Government's support, providing it can extract strict guarantees from Khan, or any other potential owner, about Wembley's future use.
Sport England, the grassroots funding agency, put £120million into Wembley's total construction bill of £757million, and it has to give its consent to any change of ownership, as does the sports minister.
In pictures | The history of Wembley Stadium
Glenn, the main champion for the sale of the national stadium, calmly explained the rationale for the sale to the MPs, who initially tried to find holes in his arguments but by the end of the 150-minute session appeared to be on board, too.
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He pointed out that the FA only took ownership of Wembley in 1999 and barely a handful of FAs around the world - and no World Cup-winning nations - own their stadiums, suggesting that running the stadium has been a distraction.
But his real argument was based on the "transformative" nature of the windfall - an upfront cash sum of £600million, with £300million in retained income from Wembley's hospitality business.
He said this would enable the FA to put an extra £70million a year into grassroots facilities and, once that was matched by funding partners, it would mean a total investment in new artificial and grass pitches, changing rooms and coaching schemes of more than £2billion over the next 20 years.
"We have a plan for investment, and it's a good plan, but if we can accelerate that, and make things happen much sooner, why wouldn't we consider it?" he said.
Jo Stevens, the Labour MP for Cardiff Central, asked Glenn the most fundamental question: is £600million enough?
The FA boss explained that Khan's offer should be seen as £900million, with the FA retaining the only part of Wembley that currently makes significant money, Club Wembley, while giving up the need to fund Wembley's upkeep.
"So we're not just trying to sell the stadium, we're selling it with a large number of restrictive clauses," Glenn said.
This, he said, "makes it tough to value", which is why the FA called in financial advisory group Rothschild to "model the value of a London-based NFL franchise" and the £600million cash part of Khan's offer is based on that valuation, with the key consideration being the NFL's potential to sell TV rights in new time zones.
In Pictures | Shahid Khan: Fulham FC and Jacksonville Jaguars Owner
But, he added, the only real way to know if Khan's offer is enough is "to test it in the market", which is why the FA and Sport England are currently "codifying the various protections into a contract... that we can take out to the world and ask if anybody can beat that number".
That contract, he said, will be ready "within the month".
Earlier, however, the panel did hear a dissenting view from former England and Manchester United defender Gary Neville.
Describing the idea as a "short-term play we'll regret forever", the TV pundit and Salford City co-owner said: "I despair at the thought that the FA board and management are sitting there and thinking that they have to sell Wembley to fund grassroots football.
"They are talking about an extra £70million a year for 20 years - that's a pittance in football, it's a pittance in government, it's the price of a full-back!"