Trade talk: Fagan's uncertainty around free agent Lion

Chris Fagan expects St Kilda’s big splash last off-season to affect the club’s negotiations with star free agent Zac Bailey this season.

Fagan irked the Saints during the pre-season after describing contracts handed out to Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and Tom De Koning as a ‘danger’ to the rest of the league, and he is certain that it will now have a knock-on effect.

While Fagan clearly kicked a hornet's nest at St Kilda when making those comments, the back-to-back premiership coach says he intended to just flag those contracts as something the competition should keep an eye on as the consequences of it start coming to fruition elsewhere.

“It was a massive jump from I think the highest paid players might have been around the $1.3 million sort of mark (previously),” Fagan told SEN Breakfast.

“Suddenly, there's a player that's getting paid $2 million and another one that's not far away from that number, and I just thought, ‘Oh, that's a pretty big jump pretty quickly. I'm not sure whether that's good for the game, we need to think about it’.

“I just really threw it out there as something we should debate and keep, keep an eye on.”

With the market’s ceiling now set higher than ever before, and more than Brisbane were anticipating 12 months ago, Fagan admitted his club will need to ask themselves how far they’re willing to go to keep Bailey if rivals offer ridiculous money this off-season.

“Probably (we will have to pay more than we thought) because the football economy is way different now,” Fagan said.

“Probably what we were planning for was around about where the best players were getting paid 12 months ago.

“Now that gives us a lot to think about, there's a knock-on effect everywhere when you start to pay that sort of money for players.

“That's something we're going to have to talk about as a club and whether we're prepared to go the whole way.

“We love Zac Bailey, he's been with us since he was 18 years of age, and he's developed at our club into the player that he is, and he's important to us.

“But, how far we're prepared to go, I'm not sure about that, and how far others are prepared to go is probably the bigger question, I guess.”

Having won the last two premierships, Brisbane’s list is the envy of the rest of the competition, and there’s no doubt several of their players will receive huge offers to leave in the coming seasons.

With that in mind, Fagan was asked whether his list would consider staying for less money to put team success over financial again.

“It's an ever-changing landscape,” Fagan said.

“I think at some point in time, if we think we need to, we'll talk to our playing group about it.

“But we've tried to keep our player payments fair in terms of where players sit in importance to our footy club. We don't think we've overpaid anyone.

“We're probably pretty keen to keep that intact, but whether we will be able to or not able to in this new economy that we have, I'm not sure what the answer is for the future.

“So it'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.”

Listen to Fagan’s full chat with Kane Cornes and David King here