The previous benchmark had stood for barely six months: Chelsea’s roughly £900,000 for the USWNT defender Naomi Girma, prised out of San Diego Wave in January 2025. Smith didn’t just beat it. She became the first Canadian, in either the men’s or women’s game, to move anywhere for a world-record fee.
So where does someone like this come from?
Both her grandfathers played the game abroad, Wayneworth Smith in Jamaica and Francisco Riquelme in Chile. She started kicking a ball at three. Her father coached her first team, the way most fathers do, and the whole thing might have stayed a nice suburban Ontario story had she not been quite so obviously, inconveniently good. She came up through the North Toronto Nitros in the semi-professional League1 Ontario, which is a long way from the Emirates in every sense that matters: geography, money, floodlight wattage.
In 2019, aged 15 years and 94 days, she became the youngest senior international Canada has ever had. At the 2023 World Cup she was the youngest player in Canada’s squad, 18 years old. Then came the club leap that changed the register entirely: a first professional season at Sporting CP in Portugal in 2023–24, where she scored 13 goals in 18 appearances and was named the league’s Revelation Player. Thirteen goals in eighteen games, in a foreign country, as a teenager.
Liverpool moved first the following summer, making her their marquee signing of the window for a club-record fee. One season later, Arsenal made her a millionaire footballer and a line in the history books. Two clubs, two record fees, in the space of a year.
Smith has won the PFA Women’s Young Player of the Year twice She claimed it in 2025 for her 2024/25 season at Liverpool and retained it in 2026 for her 2025/26 season at Arsenal. Back-to-back, at two different clubs. Only one other woman has ever won consecutive Young Player awards: Manchester City’s Lauren Hemp, who won three on the trot between 2019 and 2022.
Can she guide Canada to the 2027 World Cup?
The tournament is in Brazil, 24 June to 25 July 2027. But there’s a hurdle before the dream, and it’s nearer than people think. Canada must qualify through the Concacaf W Championship in late 2026, 27 November to 5 December. Reach the semi-finals and you get a direct berth; lose in the quarters and you drop into play-offs. That is the actual near-term test, and until it’s passed, everything about Brazil is hypothetical. As for Smith’s own weight in that shirt: she has a little over 20 senior caps and a handful of goals, which is a modest ledger for a player this hyped, precisely because she’s so young. Her tournament proof-of-concept exists, though. At the 2024 Concacaf W Gold Cup she scored twice and was named the Best Young Player. Canada, for their part, won Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2021 but have not gone deep at recent World Cups. A run in Brazil is aspiration, not forecast. It starts, unglamorously, with a group stage in the Concacaf winter.
Can she win a Ballon d’Or Féminin?
No Canadian has ever won it. Not one. The award has run since 2018, Ada Hegerberg first, Megan Rapinoe in 2019, and since then a near-total Spanish takeover, with Aitana Bonmatí the reigning multiple-time holder. Three Canadians were nominated for the very first time in 2021: Christine Sinclair, Ashley Lawrence and Jessie Fleming, the year Alexia Putellas won. Sinclair, the most decorated player Canada has produced and the world game’s all-time leading international goalscorer, was among them, and she never won it. The greatest footballer the country has produced does not have this trophy.
So when someone asks whether Olivia Smith could be the first, the fair reply is: it would be historic precisely because nobody from her country ever has, including the woman whose records she grew up admiring.
What would actually have to happen is not mysterious. She would need to keep scoring at a level well beyond 10 in a season. She would need Arsenal to win the things they keep almost winning, because voters reward silverware and stages. She would need to drag Canada somewhere they haven’t recently been. And she would need to do it while a generation of Spanish midfielders currently owns the ballot.