List Of Most Expensive Women's Association Football Transfers

The following is a list of most expensive women's association football transfers, which details the highest transfer fees ever paid for players, as well as transfers which set new world transfer records.

The first transfer in women's football reported as a record was that of Milene Domingues from Fiammamonza to Rayo Vallecano in 2002, two decades before professionalism in Spanish women's football. The current transfer record was set by the transfer of Olivia Smith from Liverpool to Arsenal for £1million in July 2025.

Highest transfer payments in women's association football

Olivia Smith, Keira Walsh, Tarciane, and Barbra Banda each appear twice on the list. The players on the list include at least one from each continental region except Oceania ( OFC). Though players from Europe (UEFA), North America (CONCACAF), South America (CONMEBOL), Africa (CAF), and Asia ( AFC) are all represented, most are European and the purchasing clubs are all European, North American, or Asian.

''This list only includes transfers where a fee amount is reported publicly. Fees are in thousands.''

Most expensive player by confederation

History

Compensated transfers in the 20th century

Prior to women's football teams having oversight from football federations, compensation was still paid for some transfers. The first compensated transfer of a female footballer was of Molly Walker, from Lancaster Ladies to Dick, Kerr Ladies in 1918; Walker was offered expenses paid as well as payment in lieu for joining the team. In the 1970s, various teams in Italy, and Olímpico de Villaverde in Spain, offered a signing fee for some players; in 1973, Conchi Sánchez was paid P^ts 75,000 (approximately €300 at the time) to leave Villaverde and join Gamma 3 Padova in Italy, with Stade de Reims in France offering P^ts 1million for Villaverde's Victoria Hernández a few weeks later. Padova paid transfer bonuses in 1973, for German players Christia Nusser and Monika Bardof, "that would be desired by male players of pain'sTercera División, and some of Segunda."

Women's football transfer record

First records

The first transfer fee for a women's footballer known to be reported as a world record was the £200,000 ($310,000; €235,000) paid for Milene Domingues in 2002. At the time, there was little to no money in women's football due to the limited number of professional leagues, and financial news focused on player salaries; Domingues received greater attention for the reported record salary she was to receive, though she ended up never playing for Rayo Vallecano, the club that signed her, due to non-Spanish players being unable to play in the Spanish women's league at the time. However, Domingues was not signed for her playing qualities, instead being a popular figure as the personable wife of Ronaldo, and her record signing was made more for promotional reasons. She fulfilled promotional duties at Rayo while returning to play for her previous team, Fiammamonza, without salary.

This transfer sum was not overtaken until September 2020, when Pernille Harder was bought by Chelsea for £250,000 ($334,000; €280,000). When, almost a year prior to Harder's transfer, Sam Kerr had also moved to Chelsea, focus was still on her large salary. In beating the near 20-year record by her transfer, Harder said she hoped it would help start to show that women's football can also be a club business like men's football and receive more money.

Harder gave similar comments when her record was beaten two years later by Barcelona buying Keira Walsh from Manchester City for £400,000 ($457,000; €470,000) in September 2022. Walsh instead was coy, saying she did not think about the record much, that she wanted to play at the club and "it just so happens that's what they paid for er" ''The Athletic'' and BBC Sport wrote that Walsh's transfer "shifted the ecosystem", having a significant impact on the market of women's football, that it showed "even the top clubs are not immune to the risk of losing their best players to rivals who are now willing to spend". It marked exponential growth for the transfer market; spending in transfer windows had been growing, with the winter 2021–22 window setting a then-record for global transfers in one season at a total of around £364,000 ($488,000; €432,000). Walsh's fee alone in the summer 2022 window eclipsed this, with further high transfer fees being paid as a domino effect supplementing the season total.

Market growth

Walsh's transfer was predicated on the growing popularity of women's football and its players in England and Spain; after the fee showed the financial power of this growth in popularity, fees continued accelerating in such markets. In the next transfer window, Bethany England transferred (to Tottenham Hotspur from Chelsea) for a fee that equalled Harder's previous record. Following this and a slew of other six-figure transfer fees in England's Women's Super League (WSL) in 2023, some WSL managers criticised the rapid spending growth of the larger clubs; in September 2023, England's head of women's football, Baroness Sue Campbell, said that future limits on spending would be introduced.

Chelsea still made some large signings in January 2024, including buying forward Mayra Ramírez from Levante for what could have increased to a new world record fee of £426,000 ($544,000; €500,000) with bonuses. The club in particular were seeking a striker, and players in this position were in high demand across Europe at the time. Only weeks later, this fee was considerably beaten by another striker transferring out of the Liga F, when NWSL side Bay FC triggered the release clause of Madrid CFF's Racheal Kundananji to pay what would total £685,000 ($862,000; €805,000). Kundananji's record transfer fee came less than 18 months after Walsh's record, and was a 71% increase on it, which ''The Independent'' said demonstrated how significantly women's transfers had escalated in that period. The period of rapid financial growth was considered positive, as a sign of development in women's football, but reports continued to warn about pricing out lower-table and less wealthy clubs, and of clubs not investing in other improvements while spending on players.

Reaching 1 million

With the growth of the women's transfer market and six-figure fees becoming more common, sports media began speculating how soon a club would surpass the 1million barrier. Increased revenues since 2022 and a changing landscape of women's football – which saw clubs want to secure players with longer contracts and minimum-fee release clauses – also contributed to the continued growth in transfer fees. The market growth also rapidly raised the comparative market values for many players, with experts opining that previously set six-figure release clauses which had seemed unachievable were, by 2024, significantly undervaluing players, contributing to many being bought for those fees. In summer 2024, Chelsea and Arsenal both made seven-figure offers in Euros for Barcelona players (Aitana Bonmatí and Walsh respectively), with both declined. The 1million mark was achieved in January 2025, when Chelsea bought American defender Naomi Girma from San Diego Wave FC for $1.1million (£883,000; €1.05million). While the impact of the NWSL's spending power had been noted, pundits had predicted it would be a player from the Liga F to reach the milestone first. Tom Garry also wrote that Girma's fee "could already have been comfortably smashed for a winger or a No 9".

The first transfer fee to exceed 1million in all main currencies was that of Olivia Smith, when Arsenal bought her from Liverpool in July 2025 for £1million (€1.16million; $1.36million); Liverpool had rejected multiple other fee offers for Smith, for whom they had paid around £200,000 the previous summer.

Record progression

NWSL allocation money

The American National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) has a single-entity structure that resembles Major League Soccer and, prior to August 2024, had domestic transaction rules that differ from other global leagues. NWSL players are contracted to the league itself rather than the clubs to which the league has assigned them. Before the 2020 NWSL season, the league introduced allocation money, a cash-equivalent credit that clubs can purchase from the league. Allocation money can be used to exceed the league salary cap, fund club operations, or pay fee-involved loans and transfers for players outside of the league. Clubs can trade credits like other non-cash league assets. A significant number of players in the NWSL then began being traded for allocation money.

NWSL trades – including those for allocation money – have different principles economically than domestic transfers in other leagues: domestic loans and transfers in the NWSL do not require a change of contract, as players are employed by the league; (pages 49–65 of the PDF, separately numbered) allocation money trades can also involve non-cash assets with no equivalent monetary value (such as other players, international roster spots, and the right to initiate negotiations with a player who is not already under contract with the NWSL); and no real currency is exchanged between transfer clubs, as the allocation money is a credit managed by the NWSL itself.

The NWSL also limits the amount of allocation money a team can acquire in one season, though allows teams to retain purchased but unused allocation money credits in subsequent seasons. Additionally, teams have traded players for credits they would acquire in future seasons.

In January 2024, the NWSL announced that it would begin to phase out allocation money with the plan to stop using it altogether at the end of 2026, citing exponential financial growth in foreign leagues as the reason it considered allocation money obsolete. At the same time, the NWSL also implemented an intra-league transaction fee system, a net transfer fee threshold of $500,000 for both intra- and inter-league transfers, and an additional 25-percent salary cap charge against net transfer fees exceeding $500,000. In August 2024, with the aim to attract more foreign players to the NWSL following the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup, further changes were made to bring the holistic elements of NWSL trades more in-line with global standards: principally that trades require player consent; contracts must be guaranteed; and players will become free agents upon the expiry of any contract. The NWSL Draft was also abolished.

Largest cash-equivalent trades

Victoria Pickett and Crystal Dunn appear in this list twice, the latter for two allocation money-involved trades in one day as part of a three-team transaction. The largest allocation-money transaction was for forward María Sánchez, who requested a trade for personal reasons communicated to her club, Houston Dash, shortly after it gave her the most expensive NWSL contract; the club obliged and traded her to San Diego Wave in exchange for an overall $500,000 in cash-equivalent credits, plus two years of international roster slots, in April 2024.

''This list only includes transactions involving more than $100,000. Fees are in thousands.''

Spain Compensation List

For the 2020 season, Spain introduced the "Compensation List", part of a wider agreement between women's football clubs as a step towards professionalism; intended to compensate the expenses of youth training when young players joined senior clubs, the Compensation List ruled that players under the age of 23 could only transfer between Spanish clubs for a fee, even when their contract is expired. The club they were to leave would set an asking price, and if no other club was willing to pay (and the player did not move to a club outside of Spain), the original club had to re-sign the player with a salary increase matching a percentage of the asking price. There were criticisms of the Compensation List, as few clubs wanted to pay and it was seen to encourage young talents to leave the country.

Before the Compensation List was accepted, a lawsuit seeking to prevent it was brought by Spanish players' union Futbolistas ON, arguing that it should be invalid due to not having been negotiated within labour agreements and due to being used as a disguised retention fee. Though the Court approved the Compensation List, it upheld that clubs which had not taken part in its negotiation (Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Athletic Club) could not use the Compensation List, and that cases of "disproportion" should have individual appeals (based on European litigation involving French clubs). The highest fees set on the Compensation List were for Eva Navarro and Ona Batlle of Levante, each for €500,000, and Maite Oroz and Damaris Egurrola of Athletic Club, each for €250,000 – at the time the fees were set (ahead of the summer 2020 transfer window), all would have broken the world record. Oroz and Egurrola had already announced their plans to depart Athletic Club, and so the high fees were seen as punitive; Oroz had already signed for Real Madrid before the court case, with Real Madrid not wanting to pay the fee being one reason it was brought. As neither club was involved in negotiations, the fee was deemed invalid.

By the end of 2020, after Batlle left the country and Navarro had been without a club until returning to Levante against her wishes, Spanish clubs agreed to limit the fees set on the Compensation List in order to prevent abuse. The agreement that had created the List expired at the end of the season.

Gallery

File:20241006-Olivia Smith (cropped).jpg, Olivia Smith, the most expensive: women's footballer, women's forward, and women's footballer in a domestic transfer
File:Naomi Girma (cropped 2).jpg, Naomi Girma, the most expensive women's defender
File:Keira Walsh 20181009 01 cropped.jpg, Keira Walsh, the most expensive women's midfielder
File:Phallon Tullis-Joyce 2022-01 (cropped).jpg, Phallon Tullis-Joyce, the most expensive women's goalkeeper
File:NC Courage vs Houston Dash (Mar 2024) 009.jpg, María Sánchez, the most expensive women's footballer in a domestic NWSL trade

See also

* Professionalism in women's association football
*List of world association football records
*List of most expensive association football transfers

Notes

In player transfers between the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) and other leagues, the NWSL as a single-entity organization conducts the transaction and pays or receives any fees, rather than member clubs conducting the deal directly. NWSL clubs fund transactions by purchasing allocation money credits from the league, which can be traded between NWSL clubs or acquired from the league through non-financial means. Such transfers into the league are subject to FIFA transfer regulations. Once in the league, international players can be subject to different rules for domestic transfers within the NWSL.

References

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