Keira Walsh is having a pretty spectacular summer.
The England midfielder has signed a three-year contract with Barcelona, who broke the women’s soccer transfer record by paying a reported £400,000 to bring her over from Manchester City.
It is widely claimed that the old record was Pernille Harder’s move from Wolfsburg to Chelsea, valued at somewhere above £250,000. That claim might be up for debate: the trade that saw Alex Morgan join the San Diego Wave saw the Orlando Pride receive $275,000 and Wales midfielder Angharad James. Either way, it seems fair to say that Walsh’s move is the new global record.
Walsh will join a Barca side that lost the Champions League final this past May, but also only lost two games in the entirety of the 2021-22 season. While the club will have to make due without Alexia Putellas due to injury, Walsh will join a star-studded midfield that includes Aitana Bonmatí and Patri. She’ll also be the second England starter to suit up for Barca, joining Lucy Bronze.
When will this become the norm?
Walsh’s move being a world record dramatically underlines how much room for growth there is in women’s soccer. It doesn’t even cost half a million pounds to get one of the world’s best midfielders, at 25, coming off of a triumphant and widely-watched Euro 2022, onto your roster. Man City, arguably the wealthiest soccer club on the planet, was willing to let a player fitting that description go for what would constitute a rounding error on the men’s side of their club.
Women’s soccer has made tremendous strides in recent years, but the fact is that when it comes to salaries and transfer fees, clubs are still dragging their feet. If Keira Walsh, at this moment in time, can be brought to Barcelona for £400,000, imagine the team that any mid-tier European soccer club can build if they’d set aside a meager £5 million transfer budget for their women’s team.
Take the example of Lyon, who on the women’s side have made it their policy to field about half of the French national team, and then fill the rest of the lineup out with international all-stars. Lyon is a wealthy club in the grand scheme of things, but when it comes to big-time European soccer on the men’s side, their days as a Champions League dark horse are long past, largely because they’ve been priced out.
There’s not a good justification for why Walsh would only command a transfer fee at this level. The argument would probably have something to do with revenue, but we’re in a world where Barcelona’s transfer policy on the men’s side is clearly one that has disconnected the concept of revenue from expenditure.
If you’re a club like Manchester United, the ease with which you could assemble the greatest women’s soccer team ever assembled in this moment in time is frankly staggering. They’ve spent over $260 million on transfers this summer alone. Putting 3% of that figure towards their women’s team would give them, by a wide margin, the biggest transfer budget on the planet.
The giant clubs of Europe have taken the first tentative steps towards treating women’s soccer seriously. Most of them have their teams playing in real stadiums, rather than renting out a semi-pro club’s home. Clubs with training grounds that are essentially soccer heaven have, despite themselves, allowed their women’s team to train there as well. They put their players in marketing material and social media content, they take care of meals and other bare-minimum basics, and they’ve made up technical staffs of actual professionals.
The next step? Seeing how easy it would be to take over the woso world by spending at an even remotely serious level.
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