Lachie Neale will be staying at Brisbane after meeting with the club’s hierarchy at his exit meeting on Thursday.
Reports emerged on Sunday that Neale was considering requesting a trade back to Fremantle for family reasons with two years to run on his contract.
But the reigning Brownlow Medallist has confirmed he will remain at the Lions in 2022.
“I’m committed and staying at the footy club,” Neale told Brisbane’s website.
“It’s been a whirlwind few days and everything has got a little bit out of hand, but I’m fully committed to the club and came in and told ‘Fages’ (Chris Fagan), ‘DD’ (Danny Daly) and ‘Swanny’ (Greg Swann) today that that’s the case.
“I’m so excited to push on.”
Neale says the speculation over his future has been “blown out of proportion” and is confident the Lions can support his family moving forward.
“Clearly as a lot of people know now my wife is heavily pregnant, she’s from WA and has a lot of family and support network and friends in WA,” he said.
“Behind the scenes we had a couple of conversations about how that looked moving forward. Obviously with the COVID situation the last couple of years, it’s been really hard for her to see her family and friends as it has for a lot of people, and I’ve got a great support network in Perth as well.
“We were half considering the prospect of getting back at some stage, but after sitting down and talking through it with our family and friends and with the club and without my management team, it became pretty clear after a couple of days that this is where the best place for us is to be.
“Firstly, for my footy and secondly, we believe we can get the support network around us that we need moving forward.
“It sort of got blown out of proportion a bit, but now we’ve made that decision and we’re really happy and can’t wait to get stuck into next year now.”