Football transfers are not cheap. To have a player strengthen their ranks, teams are willing to pay big money. The football transfer considered to be the most expensive in the sport's history was that of Gareth Bale leaving Tottenham to play at Real Madrid. The Spanish club paid not less than £86 million (about $133 million at today's exchange rates) to have the player among its own. But recent news suggest that this record might be broken this year. According to reports in the media, UK Premier League team Manchester United is willing to almost double that amount.

Tourists crowd a water park in Wuhan city, central China's Hubei province on July 15, 2017. Days of heat wave drove many citizens to the water park for fun and coolness. Nanchang has become the new four “furnace cities” in China according to a ranking of the hottest cities released by the China Meteorological Administration on July 9. (Photo by Imaginechina/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Bodies of Palestinians, who lost their lives after Israeli attacks, are brought to Indonesia Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on May 16, 2025. Palestinians who lost their relatives were saddened. It was reported that more than 100 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attacks on northern Gaza, which started at midnight and intensified in the morning. (Photo by Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Children play on an uprooted tree along a beach in Mele, Vanuatu that was once lined with vegetation, now largely lost to storms, erosion and other environmental pressures on Saturday, July 19, 2025. (Photo by Annika Hammerschlag/AP Photo)

Malawian Saw-wa, 33, (L) and Yupin Saw-wa, 28 who lost their daughters, cry near a burnt building at the Pitakkiat Wittaya School in the northern province of Chiang Rai, Thailand, May 23, 2016. (Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)

People visit Luke Jerram's “In Memoriam”, a temporary memorial artwork for all those who lost their lives due to COVID-19, in Seaton Carew Park, Hartlepool, Britain on August 20, 2021. (Photo by Lee Smith/Reuters)

“Serengeti National Park encompasses 5,700 square miles of grassy plains and woodlands near the northern border of Tanzania, and is home to more than 3,500 lions grouped into a couple dozen prides. Photographer Nick Nichols and videographer Nathan Williamson made several extended trips to the Serengeti between July 2011 and January 2013, determined to break new visual ground in their coverage of the Serengeti Lions”. Photo: Cubs of the Simba East pride: too young to kill but old enough to crave meat. Adult females, and sometimes males, do the hunting. Zebras and wildebeests rank high as chosen prey in the rainy season. (Photo by Michael Nichols/National Geographic via The Atlantic)

Rooftops of solar powered houses are pictured in Ota, 80 km northwest of Tokyo in this October 28, 2008 file photo. One by one, Japan is turning off the lights at the giant oil-fired power plants that propelled it to the ranks of the world's top industrialised nations. With nuclear power in the doldrums after the Fukushima disaster, it's solar energy that is becoming the alternative. Solar power is set to become profitable in Japan as early as this quarter, according to the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation (JREF), freeing it from the need for government subsidies and making it the last of the G7 economies where the technology has become economically viable. (Photo by Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)