HAWTHORN coach Alastair Clarkson has sent a clear message to his players and their managers: the team comes first.

Amid renewed calls for free agency, Clarkson says keeping the core of his premiership team will become increasingly tougher with salary cap constraints but maintains the club will make a tough call or two if economics demand it.

With players of the class of Luke Hodge, Cyril Rioli and Brad Sewell in need of new deals, chief executive Ian Robson and football operations manager Mark Evans, the club's contract negotiators, face torrid times.

"They'll do that as well as they possibly can, but if one falls out of our system he falls out," Clarkson said.

"We're not going to get compromised too much. We've come too far as a footy club over the last four or five years in getting our salary cap structure in place to ever go back to those dark days when we were paying players much too much [or] more than what they were worth.

"At various stages throughout this whole salary cap saga and with the introduction of a Gold Coast team there's going to be some clubs that will lose players through being uncontracted, but we're hoping it's not going to be at Hawthorn.

"We'll do whatever we can to try and retain the players that are required to continue our success, but … we're not going to breach our salary cap and we're not going to put ourselves in a position where the relativity of our payments to certain players far, far outweigh the rest of our players."

That's bad news for managers seeking a bigger slice of the pie for their Hawthorn clients.

While Clarkson is awake to the financial realities of today's AFL environment he said clubs had to convince their players of more intangible rewards when the cap starts to pinch.

"You try to appeal to the players about the culture of your footy club and the period of success that they could have," he said.

"[That would] bind this group of players together for a long, long time not just in their footy careers, but post-footy as well."