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In the space of four weeks in early 2024, two Zambian internationals — Racheal Kundananji and Barbra Banda — became the first and second most expensive women's footballers ever. The record has since moved on. What has not changed is what the two deals said about where African women's football was heading.
In February 2024, Bay FC paid a reported $860,000 for Racheal Kundananji. Four weeks later, Orlando Pride paid a reported $740,000 for Barbra Banda. For the first time in the history of the women's game, the two most expensive players on the planet came from the same country — Zambia — and from the same national team.
Neither fee was disclosed by the clubs. Both figures are reported, drawn from reporting by the BBC, ESPN and The Equalizer at the time, and this piece labels them as such throughout. What the numbers described was real enough: in a single winter, the women's transfer record was broken twice, and both times the player crossing the line was a Copper Queen.
The record breaker: Kundananji
Kundananji's move was announced on 13 February 2024. Bay FC, an expansion club preparing for its first National Women's Soccer League season, signed the 23-year-old forward from Madrid CFF. The reported fee was $860,000 in total — an initial payment of around $785,000 with a further $75,000 in add-ons, according to the BBC's reporting. The Equalizer first reported the figure; ESPN and The Athletic reported similar numbers from their own sources. Bay FC never confirmed the figure publicly, though the club quoted the BBC's report on its own social channels.
The fee broke a record that had stood for less than a month. In January 2024, Chelsea had paid a reported $535,400 for Colombia forward Mayra Ramírez from Levante. Before that, the benchmark was the £400,000 Barcelona paid Manchester City for England midfielder Keira Walsh in 2022. Kundananji's fee more than doubled the Walsh figure.
It also made her the first African player, male or female, to break a world transfer record. She had earned the price in Spain. After joining Madrid CFF from Eibar in 2022, she scored 33 goals in 43 Liga F matches. She signed with Bay through the 2027 season, with an option for 2028.
She delivered quickly. On her debut, as a 62nd-minute substitute in Bay's first home match on 30 March 2024 against Houston Dash, she scored a 93rd-minute equaliser — the first goal by a Zambian in NWSL history, in the first NWSL match a Zambian had ever played. She finished her first season with five goals and four assists in 21 regular-season appearances. In 2025 she added four goals and four assists in 24 matches, and she left Bay as the club's all-time leading scorer, with 12 goals across all competitions in nearly three seasons. On 8 October 2026, she was traded to Chicago Stars FC for $700,000 in intra-league transfer funds.
The second fee: Banda
Banda's move followed on 7 March 2024, when Orlando Pride announced her signing from Chinese Women's Super League side Shanghai Shengli. The reported fee was $740,000, confirmed to ESPN by sources familiar with the deal — the second-highest fee in women's football history at the time. The fee was driven by a buyout clause in her Shanghai contract, and Shanghai retained a sell-on clause on any future transfer. Her contract with Orlando was a four-year deal through the 2027 season, reported to be worth around $2.1 million all-in including bonuses, which would make her one of the highest-paid players in the NWSL.
Banda arrived with a record of her own. At Shanghai she had scored 41 goals in 52 appearances across all competitions. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 she scored back-to-back hat-tricks — the first woman ever to do so at an Olympic Games. She was part of Zambia's first-ever Women's World Cup squad in 2023.
What she did next justified every dollar of the reported fee. In her debut NWSL season she scored 13 regular-season goals — second in the league only to Temwa Chawinga's record-setting tally — and added six assists. She scored four goals in the play-offs, a new NWSL post-season record, including the only goal of the Championship final on 23 November 2024, a 1–0 win over Washington Spirit that delivered Orlando's first league title and completed the Shield-and-Championship double. She was named Championship MVP, made the NWSL Best XI, and was voted BBC Women's Footballer of the Year for 2024 — the first African to win the award — and CAF African Women's Footballer of the Year. At the Paris Olympics that summer she scored four goals, including a hat-trick against Australia, taking her to 10 Olympic goals, the most by any African player in Olympic history.
She has since been selected to the FIFPRO Women's World 11 in both 2024 and 2025, earned a third consecutive Ballon d'Or Féminin nomination in 2026, and on 14 September 2026 signed a new contract with Orlando through the 2029 season. By late September 2026 she had 30 league goals in 52 appearances for the Pride.
A record that did not stand still
The two Zambian fees held the top two places in the women's game for less than a year. In January 2025, Chelsea paid a reported $1.1 million for United States defender Naomi Girma from San Diego Wave — the first seven-figure fee in women's football. In July 2025, Arsenal paid a reported £1 million for Canada forward Olivia Smith from Liverpool. In August 2025, Orlando Pride themselves broke the record again, paying a reported $1.5 million for Mexico international Lizbeth Ovalle from Tigres. By September 2025, London City Lionesses had reportedly paid £1.43 million for France midfielder Grace Geyoro — a figure that, in dollar terms, pushed the benchmark higher still.
That is the point. Kundananji and Banda did not just set a record; they set a market in motion. The women's transfer record had been broken twice in the winter of 2024 and then three more times in the course of 2025, each new mark larger than the last. The two Zambians were the moment the market stopped treating six-figure fees as exceptional and started treating seven-figure fees as normal.
What the two deals actually said
Strip away the record-chasing and the two deals tell a more durable story about African women's football. Both players were developed outside the European academy system — Banda through Zambia's domestic game and then China, Kundananji through Zambia and then Spain's mid-table — and both were bought on the strength of goals, not reputation. Both were 23 years old. Both were signed by NWSL clubs that were either brand new, in Bay's case, or chasing a first title, in Orlando's case. The buyers were not buying names. They were buying the two most productive young forwards available, and the two most productive young forwards available happened to be Zambian.
There is a second lesson, about timing. Zambia's women's national team played its first World Cup in 2023. Within seven months of that tournament, its two star forwards had set the two biggest transfer fees in the history of the women's game. A World Cup debut, in other words, can be a shop window — but only if the players in it are ready to be bought, and only if the domestic structures behind them have produced players worth buying at that price. Zambia's did.
And there is a third lesson, about who benefits. Both deals were reported, not disclosed — the clubs never published the figures, and the numbers that circulated came from journalists' sources. That opacity is the norm in the women's game, and it matters: when fees are reported rather than disclosed, the players' market value is set in public by reporting, and the reporting is only as good as the sources behind it. Sportblot's rule, set out in our money explainer, is to label every figure Disclosed, Reported or Estimated, and never to present a reported number as a confirmed one. The $860,000 and $740,000 in this piece are reported figures. They are also, on the available evidence, the right figures — consistent across the BBC, ESPN, The Equalizer and the clubs' own announcements of the deals themselves.
What it means for the continent
The Zambian pair's winter of 2024 is now history, and the record they set has been passed four times over. But the direction of travel they established has not reversed. African players are no longer a bargain aisle in the women's transfer market. They are the market's headline acts — and the fees now being paid for them, seven figures and rising, are the measure of how far the continent's women's game has travelled from the days when its best players left for nothing.
The next record-breaker may not be Zambian. But the path she walks — from an African league to a world-record fee — was first walked by two Copper Queens, four weeks apart, in the winter of 2024.
