Most Expensive Players in Football: Ranking the top 10 by transfer fees

#7 Gareth Bale = £85,300,000 (Tottenham Hotspur to Real Madrid)

Real Madrid CF v Legia Warszawa - UEFA Champions League

Gareth Bale is a 29-year-old right winger who currently plays for Real Madrid in La Liga. He has also featured for Wales' national side 75 times since making his debut back in May 2006.

A product of Southampton's prestigious youth academy (Theo Walcott, Luke Shaw, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, etc.), Gareth Bale stood out from the rest almost immediately. His rapid speed, skill and footballing intelligence marked him out as one to watch from the get-go and, sure enough, scouts from top clubs began to attend his games.

Within a year of Bale being in Southampton's senior squad, he was signed by Tottenham Hotspur for £13m. His development at Spurs was swift and he progressed from being a left-back to a left winger, to finally being played as a centre-forward, a position in which he flourished for many years.

By September 2013, the inevitable happened: Gareth Bale was signed by a top European club - Real Madrid. Los Blancos paid 100m euros (£85.3m) for the 24-year-old which set a record for the most amount of money a player had been signed for at that point, eclipsing the £80m deal Madrid had agreed with Ronaldo several years prior.

Now, though, with talks of Bale being unsettled at Madrid, he could be set to leave them this summer. Could we see another potential record breaker soon?