Gold Coast will next year and for the next five years keep paying him the salary he has been earning this year at Richmond. The reason they can afford to do so is because they have salary-cap room but also because he is more valuable to the Suns next year than he will be to Richmond. For the Suns he brings so much more than outside pace. He also delivers experience and talent, he is an elite trainer and a person of good character who, importantly, wants to be there. Richmond's Brandon Ellis is set to join Gold Coast. Credit:Eddie Jim If he stayed at Richmond his pay could have been cut and he would not have had the security of a five-year deal. Richmond also have to continue to evolve their list and so need to start bringing on players such as Marlion Pickett, Patrick Naish, Sydney Stack and Riley Collier-Dawkins, which means something has to give.

Loading The Suns' problem is not older players getting in the way of emerging talent, it is not having enough good older players (Ellis is only 26 but all things are relative) to help bring on the emerging talent. The conversations between his manager Marty Pask and Richmond’s list manager Blair Hartley and the Suns’ Craig Cameron have been understanding because both Cameron – who used to be at Richmond – and Hartley know Ellis’ story, why he is a loved figure and why the move makes sense. Carlton had been interested, and given he grew up in North Carlton there was a synergy there, but the Blues' interest waned when they chased hard for Stephen Coniglio. They resumed their chase for Ellis once Coniglio re-signed but Ellis felt jilted by then. In the end one of the most decisive points about the Ellis departure is that the thing that made Richmond fall in love with him is the same thing that will make him leave.

The Tigers love his earthiness, his passion and his honesty as much as his pace and run. They love his openness and his family commitment. But they can’t give him what he needs now and what has driven him since he was 16. Ellis wants to succeed as a footballer so he can care for his family. He wants a good long-term contract so he can help give his family the financial independence and stability they never had when he was growing up. The story of how Ellis came to be a Tiger, the story that he delivered in front of the players in the 2017 pre-season, was a moment of unvarnished honesty that provided one of the foundations on which this new tight Richmond group was built. This group reformed itself around a modern coaching ethos of care, of vulnerability and of story telling. It is an approach that reasons that revealing something of yourself only makes you and the group stronger. It asks a group of ostensibly alpha males to act in an un-alpha way and in so doing become something more rounded and better than they were.

Loading Ellis, as described in Konrad Marshall’s book Yellow and Black, stood in front of the Richmond players at a 2017 pre-season camp on the Sunshine Coast and spoke of the day his dad was diagnosed with throat cancer. Dale Ellis had previously survived kidney cancer but a tumour had been found in his throat. Brandon Ellis was in year 10 at the time. He immediately quit playing footy and stopped going to school so he could just be around his dad. Football was irrelevant. The family lived in a small first-floor housing commission flat in North Carlton. His dad had worked at a chocolate factory before his illness and his mum cared for the family of five. They had always struggled financially. Dale ordered Brandon back to footy, telling him not to waste his talent and to make it as a player for him. Brandon returned to the game with a redoubled determination. By year’s end he made not only the Vic Metro side but the All-Australian team. Richmond chose him in the first round.

Loading “When I got drafted, I promised them [my parents] as soon as I got some money I would start looking after them,” Ellis said in the address which was recorded and re-told in Yellow and Black. “I got my family out of the flats a few years ago. I got them a rental property in Moonee Ponds near me, and pay half their rent. It’s the first time my mum and dad and brother and sister have had a backyard in their life. They can’t get the smile off their faces.” Six month after that first diagnosis and after high-dose aggressive chemotherapy, the lump in Dale’s throat was gone. He survived the cancer – again – against doctors’ expectations. “They said it was a miracle. He’s taught me to never give up, always work my arse off. Nothing has ever motivated me more. I play AFL for my dad.”