Tom Boyd opens up on how mega $7m deal changed his life and why he left money on the table
Tom Boyd’s $7m deal with the Western Bulldogs changed AFL trade landscape forever. But it also changed how people see him. He opens up on the sledging, money — and if he’d do it again.
Tom Boyd reached for a napkin in the Palace Hotel when he was hit with the life-changing number.
Then a GWS Giants budding forward, Boyd was having lunch with his father Geoff at the pub near his Breakfast Point home in 2014 when his dad answered the call from his manager Liam Pickering.
It’s doubtful the patrons in the sports-mad pub had any idea the ramifications the call would have on the AFL and Boyd’s life, when Geoff relayed to the youngster that he was being offered a six-year contract from the Western Bulldogs worth about $7m.
REVEALED: THE FULL AFL RICH 100 OF 2025
“I was having lunch with my dad and that’s when he told me. And I was like, ‘can I just sign the napkin on the table?,” Boyd recalled.
It was a contract that shook up the footy landscape, forever changed Boyd’s life and might have brought the Bulldogs an elusive flag.
It also brought Boyd years of persistent forthright feedback, and eventually he left about $2m of it on the table when he retired four years into the blockbuster deal.
The money never kept the big forward warm at night and instantly changed how he was perceived.
But he would do it again.
“I would have signed it again 100 times over,” he said.
“I am absolutely grateful for the opportunities footy gave me and the life it allows me and my family to live. That is as simple as it gets.”
THE WEIGHT OF THE DEAL
A No.1 draft pick who had played nine games for the Giants and kicked eight goals, Boyd’s contract offer was monstrous, even by today’s cash-flushed footy standards.
At its peak, the deal earned Boyd about $1.5m, enough to place him right at the top of the 2025 edition of the Code Sports AFL Rich 100.
The top name on this year’s list earned between $1.45-1.55m this season.
By next year, the likes of Tom De Koning, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and potentially Chad Warner could soar past that wage.
At the time, Lance Franklin had only recently moved to Sydney on a gigantic nine-year, $10m contract and Gary Ablett was in the midst of a five-year, $9m deal.
Those two players had a body of work that put them on track to be possibly the best two players of this century so far, Boyd was highly touted but certainly didn’t have the stacked CV of ‘Buddy’ or the ‘Little Master’.
“I was the first big deal of that size really … in terms of a high pick, unproven, early in their career and breaking a contract (with the Giants) 10 months in,” he said.
When he signed the deal, Boyd said the “unfathomable money” for a young man was on his mind, but the “emotional pull” of the club swap and being a No.1 forward for the Dogs was just as strong.
Boyd played on his draft contract in 2015 at the Bulldogs before the big money kicked in the year after.
He said the cash in the contract went public “within five minutes” of him signing it, and his identity was changed immediately.
Boyd couldn’t remember any outlandish purchases made when the cash hit his account every month and described himself as a “Toyota driver” not a fancy car enthusiast.
He never got the chance to be Tom Boyd the Bulldogs’ promising young recruit, instead he was Tom Boyd the Bulldogs’ million dollar player.
“The big thing that happens from an identity point of view, you have to deal with the fact that every conversation you walk into, someone has a predetermined opinion of you that is more than just ‘he is a footballer’,” Boyd said.
“It is that ‘he is a highly-paid footballer’.”
Footy fans – of the Dogs and rival clubs – and opposition players had no qualms bringing up the big wage to the youngster’s face.
Boyd had only recently turned 19 when the deal went down.
“I didn’t handle it very well at all,” he said.
“The way it comes out is essentially people go ‘You are a footballer, you get paid a heap of money and apparently the narrative is you aren’t playing well enough, you are a useless person’.
“The amount of people who felt comfortable to come up to me and talk to me about how much money I have made – and this still happens to this day – it is a really difficult thing to get your head around in the first place.
“Particularly when you are younger, you basically are doing a trade-off between who you are as a person against your output as a footballer. When your output is stacked against essentially whether you are the best player in the game because you are the highest paid player, it is impossible to live up to that.”
Some Dogs fans will forever say that whatever Boyd was paid it was unders, given he booted three goals to finish third in the Norm Smith Medal in the miraculous 2016 triumph.
There is no price that can be put on his 60m bomb in the fourth quarter of that game.
But while he felt some love for that while he was still playing, his very next game he we was sledged by Collingwood players about his wage.
“It began again in round 1, 2017 after I had come third in the Norm Smith and played in a premiership, it didn’t stop,” he said.
“Players sledging you or fans abusing you.”
Boyd, who recently turned 30 and is now a mental health speaker and head of performance at software company Everperform, struggled to sleep amid the anxiety to deliver for the Dogs in the years after the premiership and retired in 2019.
“It’s never that the money wasn’t good or life changing, it was just that the money wasn’t enough to keep me warm at night,” he said.
“There was never a point where I could sit there and go, ‘This is the whole point of making the money’.
“I couldn’t sit there and be abused by someone who I didn’t know and go, ‘Yeah, but I am making a lot of money’ and feel better.”
He left millions on the table but was never going to eke out years on the list to keep cashing cheques.
“For me what was most important was to not destroy this incredible relationship that I have built with the Bulldogs fan base,” he said.
“I couldn’t fathom sitting at the footy club and not playing and taking money from that place. That just seemed like the worst thing in the world I to do.
“I have benefited really greatly from my time in footy and particularly making that decision earned me more respect with people and I think that is more important than the money that was left behind.
“Of all the things I regret in life, that is absolutely not one of them.”
THE NEXT WAVE
As million dollar players get younger and more common, scrutiny will follow.
De Koning announced on Wednesday he was headed to St Kilda on a deal that may net him more than $13m over eight years and his performances will be forensically watched, especially if his arrival means the departure of contracted fan favourite Rowan Marshall.
“The interesting conversation with TDK is that he is going to come in and get compared to Rowan Marshall,” Boyd said.
“He is going to have to be the No.1 ruckman in the competition every single week or people are going to say, ‘They paid a lot of money for him’. He is going to have to deal with the face he can’t judge himself on his salary. He didn’t pay himself that much, the club agreed to pay him that much.”
De Koning will join Wanganeen-Milera on a combined salary of nearly $4m, more than 20 per cent of the club’s entire salary cap.
“If St Kilda struggle next year, the criticism is going to be, 'You have got 20 per cent of your salary wrapped up in two bloke who can’t win you games’ and that is where the conversation around money will come in from my perspective,” Boyd said.
“If the club is not going well and you are getting paid a lot of money, that is a really tricky spot to be.”
Originally published as Tom Boyd opens up on how mega $7m deal changed his life and why he left money on the table
‘Financial juggernaut’: Tassie legends laud Macquarie Point Stadium vote
