Dylan Brown’s journey from Whangarei, New Zealand to the richest man in rugby league

It’s the stuff of fairytales – a kid who grew up in a house with no walls is about to become the richest player in rugby league. PAMELA WHALEY details Dylan Brown’s childhood in Whangarei, New Zealand to his mega deal at the Newcastle Knights.

It’s the stuff of fairytales.

A kid who grew up in a house with no walls is about to become the richest player in rugby league.

By now we’re all aware Parramatta five-eighth Dylan Brown will join Newcastle in 2026 on the biggest deal the game has ever seen, for more than $13 million over the next decade.

For anyone, especially a family breadwinner, that’s life-changing money.

It’s the kind of money Brown could only dream about when he moved to Australia as a 15-year-old with his mum, Catherine, some talent and an opportunity.

It’s incredible to recall that just a few years later he was tipped to become the richest player in the game one day.

Dylan Brown has gone from growing up in a $60,000 home to the richest deal in the NRL. Picture: Tim Hunter

“Anything to do with ‘million’, being a little kid you always say ‘I want to be a millionaire’,” he said as an 18-year-old while on a base contract at the Eels and being pursued by the Warriors.

At the time, he stayed with Parramatta with the faith he could be more one day.

Turns out he was right.

If he had known then how it would all turn out, what would he say?

“Holy, wow. That’s pretty cool,” he reckons.

“I obviously wouldn’t have expected it. When you come over (to Australia) as a 15 year old, you don’t even expect to play one first grade game let alone 100 or whatever. This is just a bonus. This was never the actual dream, it was just to play NRL.“

Now 24 and on the cusp of the biggest deal of his life, we take a look back at his fairytale story which starts with humble beginnings in the Northland Hills, 30 minutes outside of Whangarei on the east coast of New Zealand’s north island.

BACK TO THE START

Brown and his two older siblings Josh and Macayla grew up in a house on the edge of the rolling Northland Hills, around 100 metres up a winding driveway in the middle of nowhere.

Their parents, John and Catherine, paid $60,000 for the no frills structure more than 20 years ago, hauling it up the property and slowly upgrading it over time with whatever they could spare from their weekly paychecks.

In this house, the family of five had everything they needed but not a single flourish more. For a long time, they had a roof but no ceiling. Walls but no gyprock. And certainly no idea there was anything different about that.

“The house was rubbish. It was a very good representation of the price that we paid for it,” the Eels five-eighth recalled back in 2021.

“I won’t even say that it was liveable, because it definitely wasn’t liveable, but after the first couple of years we moved in.

“We had walls and a roof, but there was no gyprock, no insulation. It sounds bad, but it was honestly the best time of my life.

“There’d always be a bird in the house or it would be cold or a power outage or something. But we had the necessities.”

To the kids, this quiet oasis was magic.

“I invited my mates over once, and they were like, ‘Oh, do you not have walls?’ So I told them the beams were just our shelves,” Dylan said.

“This was just normal. We didn’t have much money, just like anyone else.

“In my eyes, whatever I had was enough, more than enough.

“I remember looking at some of my friends who didn’t have shoes, I wouldn’t make fun of them, but I had shoes.

“People might hear that and think, ‘That’s bad’, but it’s actually not.

“It depends on how you grow up, it was normal to me. If my mum told me the grass was purple I would think it was purple.”

Whangarei itself is a beautiful place with more hard luck stories than not.

Poverty and crime are common.

NRL players like Brown, Adam Blair, James Fisher-Harris, Paul Turner and Wiremu Greig are all celebrated for being raised in the area but going onto bigger and better things.

They’re up against a lot, and only through their own personal and familial sacrifices can they make it out of a cycle of poverty and crime.

The Browns had one car, an “ugly white Commodore with a red stripe”, and when that broke down they piled into a Subaru every morning.

The kids were dropped at school at around 7am while the parents went off to work, earning just enough for sports fees and sporadic home renovations.

Mostly it got them by week to week.

In New Zealand schools are graded between 1-10 relative to their population of kids from low socio-economic backgrounds. It helps determine where government funding should go. A decile one school is in the top 10 per cent of schools with the highest population of students from low socio-economic communities. Dylan’s was a decile two.

Brown has played eight games for the Kiwis. Picture: Hannah Peters/Getty Images

“There’s times where I complain about the smallest things. And then I think, relax. Remember where you came from,” he said.

Parramatta spotted him at a rugby carnival when he was a teenager, and that’s where his life changed.

SIMPLE MATTERS

Family is still everything to Brown. He doesn’t want his parents to work as hard as they have had to all their lives.

The $13 million he will earn from the Knights as well as job security for the next 10 years will give his family the kind of freedom only money can buy.

“It’s a lot of money when you think about it,” he said this week.

“But it wasn’t the money that was dragging me away, it was the security of it. I never wanted to leave and I had a few discussions with Parramatta and they put forward their best contract and the Knights (offer) was just too hard to turn down.

“It’s the longevity of the contract, not so much the money.”

Dylan’s dad John now lives with him.

The pair will relocate to Newcastle at the end of the year along with Dylan’s partner, while he also helps out his mum and sister Macayla and her two young children Reuben and Grace.

Not that they put any pressure on him to take the astronomical money on offer from the Knights.

“Anyone that knows my family, a way to describe them is very chilled, they don’t really care,” Dylan said this week.

“As long as I’m happy, as long as I’m still playing footy and I’m on the field and not injured, they’re happy for me.

“I’m living with my dad now. Hopefully I can get him a granny flat or something. Dad will probably come with me. And I have a partner now too. So we’ll be going up there at the end of the season.”

The Browns were happy when they had nothing.

That kind of support is priceless.

Originally published as Dylan Brown’s journey from Whangarei, New Zealand to the richest man in rugby league