First £1m player in women’s football nears – but perhaps at the cost of competition

There has been a rapid escalation of fees in the female game which is good in some ways but could signal a new imbalance in the sport

Arsenal’s attempt to bring England international Keira Walsh home from Barcelona this summer, in what would have been a world-record fee, feels like a landmark moment. Women’s football will soon see its first £1 million player, 45 years after Trevor Francis became the first in the men’s game when he left Birmingham City for Nottingham Forest in 1979.
The fact we are seeing bids worth hundreds of thousands of pounds in one transfer window is further evidence of growth in the women’s game, but there are still far too many clubs who could not even imagine making offers of more than £900,000 for an England international.
This has happened quickly. Nobody would have predicted these sorts of fees for players when the Women’s Super League was launched in 2011. Yet it is what generations of female players and administrators have been striving for, most of them without anything like the financial benefits the current cohort receive.
When you look around the sport at club level, there is more money to spend on players, greater rewards on offer to the world’s best and increasingly lucrative options from a clutch of powerful clubs that have emerged in Europe as well as the United States.
The Walsh deal on the table for Barcelona to consider is understood to have been around £930,000. It is a bid they rejected, even though the 27-year-old is in the final year of her contract and will be able to leave as a free agent next summer.
Earlier this year, Zambia international Racheal Kundananji became the most expensive player in the world when she signed for US club Bay FC from Madrid CFF in a deal worth £685,000.
Compared to the men’s game, the sums involved are still paltry. Birmingham City, who are currently in League One, have just paid £12 million for Jay Stansfield, obliterating the transfer record for a club in the third tier of English football. They also paid £800,000 for another player, Alfie May, in the last transfer window, as their American owners look to restore the club to the Championship following relegation back in May.
The world record fee in the men’s game is the £198 million Paris St-Germain paid to Barcelona for Brazilian Neymar back in 2017. The British transfer record is the £106.8 million Chelsea paid to Benfica for midfielder Enzo Fernández in 2023. 
Men’s football is operating in a different financial stratosphere, but that does not mean the bid for Walsh is insignificant. It is a huge moment. It shows that Arsenal are starting to reap the financial benefits of regularly packing out the 60,704-capacity Emirates.
It means they can make world-record bids for players – they also offered Manchester United what would have been a world-record fee for striker Alessia Russo after England’s triumphant Euro 2022 – and that inevitably gives them a competitive edge over most of the teams they are playing against in the WSL.
The era of the super club in women’s football has arrived, especially when you look at the two teams who have dominated the Women’s Champions League for more than a decade: French club Lyon and Spanish giants Barcelona.
But just as there is a (higher) price to pay to attract the world’s best players, there is also a price to pay in terms of the competitive balance of the domestic game. The drive for professionalism is creating winners and losers. The landscape has altered.
There are clubs being asked to compete with the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United in the WSL with tiny budgets in comparison. Below the top tier of the pyramid, many clubs are still struggling to make ends meet – Reading withdrew from the Championship over the summer because of the club’s “current economic realities”.
The majority of recruitment, even in the WSL, still involves free transfers, players moving when they are out of contract. It is only a gilded few who can invest heavily to improve their squads, let alone contemplate setting a world-record fee.
The rest are merely trying to keep up as best they can on a fraction of the resources and, ultimately, know they run the risk of losing their best players if one of the richer clubs decides they want them.
It raises all sorts of questions about the future direction of travel. Will a cabal of the richest and most powerful start pushing for more games against the European giants, just as in the men’s game? Will the gap between the rich and poor continue to grow? And how do supporters of women’s football feel about that?