Richmond has stormed into the Zak Butters sweepstakes with a contract so big it would reset the market and rewrite the record books.
The Tigers, quietly banking salary cap space while they rebuild, are prepared to table an offer worth around $16 million over at least eight years — a deal that would make the Port Adelaide star the highest-paid player in AFL history.
This is not a gentle inquiry. It’s a statement of intent.
Tigers load up for a historic bid
The chase for Butters has long been framed as a battle between the Western Bulldogs and Geelong, with location and family ties in Melbourne’s west seen as crucial levers.
Geelong chief executive Steve Hocking didn’t hide the Cats’ interest when he spoke on 3AW last weekend.
“Happy to acknowledge we are one of a host of clubs that would have an interest in a player of that level,” he said, summing up what half the competition is thinking.
But Richmond has changed the temperature of the room.
AFL Media reports the Tigers have engineered significant cap flexibility across the 2025 and 2026 seasons, helped by a young list on relatively modest money. That space allows them to front-load a monster deal for Butters, giving him close to $2 million a season early in the contract and daring rivals to match it.
The expectation across the industry is that Butters will command at least an eight-year deal, landing near that $2 million-a-year mark. With Richmond now fully committed to paying that figure — and structuring it aggressively — the price of admission has shifted again.
This isn’t just a big contract. In the current economic landscape of the game, it’s seismic.
The numbers behind the bombshell
On raw dollars, Richmond’s proposal would be the largest contract ever signed in the AFL.
The scale is magnified by the league’s booming salary cap. In 2016, the cap sat at $10.4 million. By 2026, it will reach $18.3 million. That surge has dragged the top end of the market with it.
Proportionally, a $2 million salary in 2026 chews up roughly the same slice of a club’s Total Player Payments as a $1.13 million salary did a decade earlier.
The comparison that still lingers in the minds of recruiters and fans comes from late 2017. North Melbourne famously dangled $1.5 million a year in front of Dustin Martin. He chose to stay at Richmond for about $1.3 million annually, a decision that became part of club folklore.
Now the Tigers are on the other side of that equation, prepared to throw the biggest number the game has seen at another club’s superstar.
Hawthorn and Collingwood are also believed to be in the Butters conversation, but it’s Richmond’s capacity to front-load and stretch the term that has jolted the race.
Butters torn between home, loyalty and history
For all the noise around him, Butters has kept his public stance measured.
“Everyone here wants to win premierships, everyone at every other club wants to win premierships as well. No matter where I am, I want to win and I loved playing with that team today (against Essendon in Round 2),” he told the ABC recently.
“Family’s important as well, it’s been important to me for a long time. My mum and dad are over this weekend so it’s good to see them. It’s obviously a big decision but I’m not going to make it any time soon.”
That last line is the one Port Adelaide clings to.
On AFL 360 on Tuesday night, Power captain Connor Rozee revealed he has already started the sales pitch to keep his mate at Alberton — without much success in getting a read.
“All that we can do as a football club is put ourselves in a position where he wants to be here. I know he’s got some of his best mates (here), we’ve grown together, we’ve been together for eight years now, myself and a bunch of other guys,” Rozee told Fox Footy.
“It’s a really tough decision. We’ve had people come and go from our football club; it’s part of the game now.
“We’re going to have these conversations throughout the whole year … he doesn’t give me much (when I ask him to stay), I know that he’s fully invested in this season, and that’s all I care about.
“That’ll take its own course at the end of the year … we’ll wait and see.”
So the equation is brutally simple yet emotionally complex: premiership windows, record-breaking money, and the pull of home in Melbourne’s west, all colliding around one of the competition’s premier midfielders.
The race has started. It won’t end quickly.
The ruckman, a rule change, and two rejected giants
While the Butters saga grabs the headlines, another story of loyalty and timing has unfolded quietly at Hawthorn.
Ned Reeves, once on the fringe and fighting for his career, has not only re-signed with the Hawks until the end of 2029 — he has done so after turning down serious interest from two of the league’s biggest Victorian clubs.
Carlton and Collingwood both came hard for the 27-year-old ruckman, according to the Herald Sun’s Jon Ralph on Fox Footy’s Midweek Tackle. On paper, it made sense. Reeves had managed just five senior games across the past two seasons and had struggled to reclaim the No.1 ruck mantle at Hawthorn.
Yet when the offers arrived, he stayed put.
Two key moments shaped that decision.
“Carlton and Collingwood came at Reeves really hard,” Ralph said.
“Sam Mitchell came to him late last year and said ‘Ned, I want you’ … (Reeves said) ‘I needed that, because he hadn’t played me for two years’, but he (Mitchell) believed in him.”
That show of faith from his coach planted the seed. The rulebook did the rest.
Reeves was on a beach in Mexico when the AFL announced changes to the ruck rules. The tweaks shifted the balance back towards athletic, leaping ruckmen rather than pure wrestlers and grapplers — a subtle shift, but one that went straight to the heart of his strengths.
“And then he’s sitting at a beach in Mexico, and he looks at his phone, and the ruck rules have changed. All of a sudden, (the rules are) incentivising the jumpers, the leapers — not the wrestlers and the grapplers,” Ralph said.
“He said to his teammates ‘I think I might be a chance again, lads’, and the rest is history’.”
In that moment, the landscape changed. Reeves went from expendable depth to a player whose skill set the game suddenly wanted again. Carlton and Collingwood saw it. Hawthorn did too — and Mitchell moved quickly to lock him away.
The ruckman backed himself, backed the coach who finally told him “I want you”, and turned his back on two heavyweights.
Now, as Richmond prepares to test the limits of the salary cap era with a historic play for Zak Butters, another Hawk stands as proof that sometimes the most important shift in a player’s future isn’t a contract figure or a postcode.
Sometimes, it’s a rule change and a coach’s belief that flips a career — and forces the rest of the competition to wonder what they’ve just missed.
