Apparently it is Jon Taylor, although the exact fee paid doesn't seem clear.
But if you factor in inflation, there is a case for arguing that our most expensive signing is actually Tony Towner. We paid £165,000 for Towner and John Seasman in 1980, with an estimated £95,000 of this being for Towner.
Using UK inflation data, £95,000 in 1980 would be worth £442,239 today, a hell of a lot more than we paid For Taylor I'm sure.
Now if you include the Seasman money, we actually spent the equivalent today of £768,100 in one go as a THIRD DIVISION CLUB on average gates of 6,000.
I think this puts into perspective all the nonsense we have heard over the past three years about breaking club transfer records
Not quite Poker
Taylor 500k
Vaulks 440k
Also, we spent 165k on Seasman and Towner plus 100k on Ronnie for the 80/81 season. Forget normal inflation, football transfer inflation is far higher, the record transfer fee at that point was less than £1.5m so today's equivalent would be over £5m for the 3. How did we do it?? Anton Johnson bought the club from the Pursehouses for £62,500 and found the club had over 250k in the bank.
Quite true Tony, the Pursehouse's motive was to prevent Boothy getting it because they believed he wanted Millmoor to be the last piece of his property jigsaw around there. Apparently they didn't do due diligence on Johnson...
Of the Towner/Seasman deal with Millwall, Tony Towner was valued at £150,000 and John Seasman was valued at £15, 000 in the £165,000 deal.
The £95,000 we paid Cardiff City for a very low scoring Ronnie Moore, was a 'plan B', after Cardiff refused to sell Peter Kitchen to us.
How different things could have been!.
I'm sure if MM had existed back then there would have been much angst on here with us signing RM over the prolific Peter Kitchen, a Mexborough born lad who'd played in a memorable FA Cup run with Leyton Orient (where are they now?) with wins over Chelsea and Middlesbrough before losing in the semi final to Arsenal. His sister Janice had the pleasure of being at Mexborough Grammar School with me
I remember seeing Kitchen Sink Arsenal
Depends how you define "expensive" but personally I'd say it was Blackstock 😕