Tottenham are tipped to smash the record for a transfer between WSL clubs in January with a proposed deal to sign Bethany England from Chelsea worth a reported £250,000.
The existing record is an estimated £200,000, the value of the agreement that took Lauren James to Chelsea from Manchester United in 2021. Only the summer 2022 deal to take Keira Walsh to Barcelona, also a world record amount at around £400,000, and Chelsea’s 2020 capture of Pernille Harder have ever exceeded England’s imminent fee when WSL clubs have been involved.
Spurs are not the first club you would look to in the realms of breaking such records, especially when transfer fees are still not the norm in women’s football and they haven’t long been a top flight team.
It suggests a number of things. Ambition for a side that improved rapidly and somewhat unexpectedly last season to finish fifth with a club-record points tally and highest number of wins in a top flight campaign. Opportunism to snap up a good player there for the taking. But also an element of urgency and concern to do something drastic to kick a nose-diving campaign into action.
The Daily Mail has reported that England has agreed to the move and said goodbye to her Chelsea teammates as early as last Friday, suggesting she could be a Spurs player by the time the WSL returns from its winter break in the middle of January. That boost cannot come quick enough.
England remains a top player. It is as recent as 2019/20 that she scored 21 times in all competitions for Chelsea and was named both WSL and PFA Player of the Year. Since then, she has was a victim of her club’s success and ambition, relegated down the pecking order by the subsequent arrival of Sam Kerr, legitimately one of the very best players anywhere in the world.
With Kerr taking things to a new level, England has wound up a back-up who seldom starts. The first half of this season has been no different, with England afforded only two WSL starts – even then in more favourable games against Brighton and Reading – and not getting on the pitch at all in some.
Once expected to succeed Ellen White as England’s first choice ‘number nine’, she has seen Alessia Russo jump to the front of that queue. She was a non-playing member of the Lionesses’ Euro 2022 triumph and wasn’t even called up for the October and November international breaks.
From her point of view, at the age of 28, a move to somewhere she will play is crucial.
England will no doubt improve…
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