Richmond Entered 2026 as a $108 Million Brand. What Did Three Wins Put at Risk?
Richmond has just finished a 3–20 season. Before that season began, however, Brand Finance’s 2025 AFL study valued the Richmond brand at about $108 million — fourth in the competition — and gave it a Brand Strength Index score of 83.2, sixth in the AFL.
Those figures are not a current post-2026 valuation, and they are not the sale price of the football club. Their value now is that they measure the institutional strength Richmond carried into one of the poorest seasons in its modern history.
That creates a much more useful puzzle than another argument about whether Richmond is a “big club”. The Tigers still had enormous membership scale, major commercial reach and an $85 million stage-one Punt Road redevelopment rising out of the ground while the senior team was losing twenty matches.
So the central question is this: how much weak football can a strong Richmond institution absorb before its brand strength stops acting like a buffer and starts becoming something the club is spending?
The full feature separates brand value from brand strength, tests what that buffer actually buys the rebuild, examines what it cannot buy, and asks what evidence in 2027 would show whether Richmond is converting its off-field power into football progress or merely consuming supporter patience.
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