Manchester U"?nited are only the second English club to have broken the world transfer record in the last 65 years following the £89m arrival of Paul Pogba.
Other than Newcastle's world record purchase of Alan Shearer in 1996, a fee of £15m, the record has actually been exclusive domain of Spanish and Italian sides ever since 1951 when Sheffield Wednesday paid the sum of £34,500 to buy Jackie Sewell from Notts County.
Within a year of Shearer joining Newcastle, rejecting a move to Old Trafford in the process, Inter had paid close to £20m to prise Ronaldo away from Barcelona. The 20-year-old was already FIFA World Player of the Year and would be again a few months later.
Real Betis stunned the world in 1998 when they raised the record to £21.5m to buy Brazilian winger Denilson, a player that was certainly very technically skillful, but one who never came close to justifying the price that was paid for him.
Inter shattered the record in 1999 when Christian Vieri moved to the San Siro for more than £30m. Lazio replaced the Italian front-man with a record of their own a year later, landing Hernan Crespo from Parma in a deal worth more than £35m in 2000.
It was then that Real Madrid completely took over, breaking the world transfer record on five consecutive occasions, starting with Luis Figo's hugely controversial £37m switch from Barcelona just a few weeks after Crespo had joined Lazio.
With Florentino Perez building the original Galacticos, Real paid even more to sign Zinedine Zidane from Juventus in the summer of 2001. Named the best in the world by FIFA in 1998 and 2000, the Frenchman didn't get off to a brilliant start in Spain, although he ended his debut campaign with one of football history's most iconic goals in the Champions League final.
Somewhat surprisingly, the record remained untouched for eight years, the longest it had gone unbroken since 1949 when there had been a 16-year gap between Johnny Morris joining Derby County and Bernabe Ferreyra joining River Plate in 1932 - not the world war in the middle.
It took Perez to return to Real to see the record broken once more. In a whirlwind summer for Los Blancos, Kaka arrived from Milan for £56m, and then the real big one only weeks later saw Cristiano Ronaldo join from Manchester United for a staggering £80m.
Gareth Bale surpassed Cristiano Ronalo when he moved to Madrid for £86m in 2013, with Pogba now transferred for £89m with various add-ons and agent fees as the world transfer record returns to England for only the second time in half a century.
Progression of the World Transfer Record Since 1996:
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