Women's Football's £1m Transfers: What Would They Be Worth in the Men's Game?

Women's football's summer of seven-figure transfers has raised a new question: what do these fees actually mean, and what would they look like in the men's market? SportsBoom crunches the numbers.

Translating the fees into the men's game

The obvious next question for a betting and sports finance audience is what these numbers would mean if the players in question were men. 

There is no exact science to this, women's and men's football operate as almost entirely separate markets, and a straight currency comparison tells you little beyond the fact that the women's game is still catching up. 

Instead, SportsBoom has scaled each fee using the revenue gap between the two English top flights.

Deloitte's Annual Review of Football Finance puts WSL clubs' aggregate revenue at £90m for 2024/25, against combined Premier League club revenue of £6.3bn in 2023/24, a gap of roughly 70 times.^[3][4]

Applying that multiple to each women's transfer fee gives a rough sense of what an equivalent deal would look like if negotiated inside the Premier League's financial ecosystem, rather than a literal prediction of what any specific player would fetch.

How we calculated it: Equivalent fee = actual transfer fee × 70 (the ratio of aggregate Premier League club revenue to aggregate WSL club revenue, per Deloitte's 2024/25 figures). This is a revenue-scaled illustration, not a market valuation. Actual fees are shaped by many other factors, including player age, position and release clauses.

The comparison is a useful gut check. On this model, Geyoro's world-record women's fee lands in almost exactly the same bracket as Tottenham's £100m deal for Sandro Tonali this summer, or a shade under Real Madrid's £107m swoop for Yan Diomande. 

Kerolin and Schröder's fees sit close to what Manchester City accepted for winger Sávio. 

Even Naomi Girma's fee, which broke a psychological barrier rather than a financial record, scales up to roughly the £65m Manchester United paid for Carlos Baleba.

None of these fees, it's worth restating, come close to the actual world transfer record in men's football, which remains Neymar's €222m move from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017, a fee that would translate to somewhere in the region of £2m if the ratio were run in reverse.