Pressure will be on Olivia Smith now but her £1m record is just the start

Move over Trevor Francis, there is a new first £1million footballer, and her name is Olivia Smith. Nearly 50 years on from Francis’s famous transfer from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest in 1979, Arsenal have signed the 20-year-old Canadian forward from Liverpool for a reported £1.1million.

The parallels between the two basically start and end there. While Francis had already scored 133 goals in 329 appearances for Birmingham City before his move, Smith has not even broken 100 senior appearances for club and country. Francis might have gone on to score the ­winner for Nottingham Forest in their European Cup final against Malmö but Smith is joining a side who are already Champions League winners. It is a landmark move from Arsenal, who hope to turn May’s win over Barcelona into a new era of domination for England’s most successful women’s football team.

Smith grew up in Whitby, Ontario and has always been a precocious ­talent. She became Canada’s youngest international debutant in 2019 when she came on against Brazil at 15 years and 94 days old. After a year at Penn State, she signed a first professional contract with Sporting Lisbon before moving to Liverpool a season later for £200,000, a club record.

She has had some stand-out moments in her first season in the Women’s Super League, where she has quickly become someone who terrorises defenders. She scored twice in Liverpool’s first win at Anfield against Manchester United and was instrumental in knocking Arsenal out of the FA Cup. She was Liverpool’s top scorer in the league with seven goals.

Quite clearly, Smith is not the best player in the world. She is not even in the top 10 players in the world. Yet. It is the yet that has pushed Arsenal finally to break this barrier within the women’s game. It has taken a while for transfer fees to get going among women’s clubs. It took 18 years for the 2002 record for Milene Domingues (which was in itself a marketing stunt for a pudding company owned by her husband given that the club she signed for – Rayo Vallecano – were not allowed to field foreign players) to be broken when Chelsea bought Pernille Harder for £250,000.

Yet in the past 18 months, it has since been broken three times for Racheal Kundananji, Naomi Girma and now Smith.

The slow move towards paying for players has been a result of a slow shift towards increased investment, not just from buying clubs but also from selling. Players have tended to have relatively short contracts of a year or two, leaving little incentive for teams to pay to get them out of them when they could just wait. Smith’s signing comes at a turning point in the women’s game.

Teams are increasingly tying down players to longer multi-year contracts – Smith’s deal at Arsenal is four years – while clubs are also beginning to turn over higher revenues. Arsenal have led the way in ticket sales and are making the Emirates their permanent home in the Women’s Super League next year. Even beyond the support they get from their parent club, they are well placed to spend in this way.

The fee itself does come with pressure. Brian Clough famously claimed Forest paid only £999,999 for Francis so that the fee didn’t affect him. Smith’s attitude is universally praised by those who have worked with her, and she is seen as very level-headed. But at the same time, it is a significant outlay on a player who will be externally expected to raise the bar even if internally there is a belief that they are paying for a high ceiling.

It also sets a benchmark. If this is what someone like Smith costs, imagine an Aitana Bonmatí or an Alexia Putellas? The record figure is only going to continue to go up, just like it did in the men’s game.

“Whenever I go to a sporting occasion, I’m always introduced as the first £1million footballer, as if that’s the only thing I achieved in my career,” said Trevor Francis in an interview with The Guardian in 2019.

Smith, like Francis, looks set to achieve plenty to eclipse the fee itself. But sometimes your legacy is more about what you represent than what you actually do.