Sports Reporting

Perceived Pressure • 9th July 2026

A love letter to the SBS

His Majesty’s Special Broadcasting Service, as I saw it described by one of its intrepid journalists recently, is a unique thing. Born out of the necessity to cater to Australia’s various post-war migrants in the 1970s, it now holds a unique and essential place in the Australian media landscape. There’s been a fair bit of chat about what a world without…

His Majesty’s Special Broadcasting Service, as I saw it described by one of its intrepid journalists recently, is a unique thing.

Born out of...

Crikey • 15th May 2026

ALL OKE: AFL clears Gold Coast Suns team manager after betting probe, Victoria's watchdog begins investigation

The AFL has cleared Gold Coast Suns team manager Mark Opie following an Integrity Unit investigation this week, after Crikey revealed he was the co-founder of a registered bookmaker called Okebet.


Crikey understands the league is satisfied there’s been no breaches of AFL rules, with Okebet removing AFL markets from its platform following this publication’s reports on Opie’s concurrent employment on May 8. The Victorian gambling watchdog, however, will be reopening its own probe into the bookm...

Crikey • 8th May 2026

Gold Coast Suns team manager is co-founder of bookmaker fined $100,000 for gambling act breaches

The team manager of the Gold Coast Suns is the co-founder of a registered bookmaker that has been previously reprimanded and fined $100,000 for breaches of Victoria’s Gambling Regulation Act, Crikey can reveal.


Mark Opie, routinely seen on the bench during AFL matches, is a team manager for the Suns’ men’s program and also a partner of boutique bookmaker Okebet.A life member at Richmond Football Club, having worked there for 24 years in various team manager roles, Opie followed departing head...

Crikey • 20th April 2026

Paint by Numbers: LIV Golf and the multi-million dollar black hole it could leave in the Australian economy

Last week, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced its new 2026-2030 strategy, which does not include future funding for one of its crown jewels, the LIV Golf tour. The tour includes a stopover in Adelaide, which since 2023 has been one of the most successful tournaments on the calendar and is contracted with the South Australian government through to 2031. 


The startup rival tour to the traditional pinnacle of men’s professional golf — the American PGA Tour — has spent extra...

Crikey • 19th March 2026

Cricket boards at loggerheads over 'deeply disturbing' gambling proposal

Cricket Australia and its constituent state cricket boards are in the thick of a battle over the direction of the game amid a proposal to increase the amount of gambling money the sport receives.


The Age’s Daniel Brettig reported overnight that the boards that run cricket in their respective states were in a bind: to be sustainable long-term, they either sell off the rights to the Big Bash franchises to Indian private equity interests, as recommended by a Boston Consulting Group report last y...

Crikey • 5th March 2026

Centimetre perfect: Remembering the life of Dennis Cometti

One of football’s most beloved personalities, broadcaster Dennis Cometti, passed away this week, leaving in his wake an extraordinary legacy of kindness, witty one-liners and a love of the game that brought a nation together. He was 76. 


Cometti worked across a range of broadcasters, getting his start at the ABC in 1972 before moving to the Seven Network, where he would become best known, from 1986 until 2001. From 2002 to 2006, he called on Nine, before returning to Seven from 2007 until he...

Perceived Pressure • 24th February 2026

We should’ve seen Pakistan’s exclusion coming. Shame on us.

Last week, BBC Sport published an extraordinary story reporting that Pakistani cricketers were not being considered by Indian-owned sides for the upcoming Hundred auction.Last year, the English Cricket Board sold off 49% stakes in each of the eight Hundred franchises, raising half a billion pounds in one-off private investment for the game. Four of the …

Last week, BBC Sport published an extraordinary story reporting that Pakistani cricketers were not being considered by Indian-owned sides for...

Crikey • 13th February 2026

Foxtel schmoozes politicians in Parliament House and rails against anti-siphoning laws

During a busy week in Canberra — between the Liberal leadership spill, visits by heads of state, and Senate estimates — Foxtel put on one of the all-time great schmoozing efforts.


The TV giant, now owned by DAZN, booked out Parliament House’s Mural Hall for what it dubbed the 2026 Parliamentary Showcase, bringing with it an all-star cast of former athletes, executives and commentators to hang out with politicians, “highlight their contribution to Australian sport and screen”, and ask very nic...

Crikey • 12th February 2026

ABC secures television and radio rights for the VFL

In a move that will delight old-school football fans, the ABC has secured television and radio broadcast rights for the Victorian Football League for the first time since 2014, Crikey understands.


Top-flight sport on the national broadcaster has been an increasingly rare treat since the professionalisation of most major sporting codes in the late twentieth century, and its football coverage in particular has been confined to the state leagues for almost 40 years.The last time the ABC had righ...

Crikey • 23rd January 2026

Foxtel owners DAZN sign sports partnership with banned Trump-linked betting company

Sports entertainment giant DAZN, the owner of Foxtel, has signed a partnership agreement with a crypto-betting website that is banned in Australia by the online gambling regulator.


Polymarket, which brands itself as a “prediction market” rather than a betting platform, signed a deal with DAZN this week that would see it fully integrated into the entertainment company’s sports coverage.In a joint press release, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan said Polymarket would be embedded “directly into the u...

Crikey • 22nd January 2026

Steve Waugh, T20 slop leagues and the international business of big cricket

Hidden in the flood of PR emails that fill journalists’ inboxes, there recently lay a gem that piqued this Crikey cricket tragic’s curiosity.


An invitation to the Australian launch of the European T20 Premier League (ETPL), which we assumed to have been sent to us by accident. After all, Crikey is hardly a sports-heavy publication, and this appeared to be yet another iteration in the proliferation of international T20 leagues played largely for the benefit of Indian mega-conglomerates seeking...

Perceived Pressure • 3rd January 2026

My special relationship with Usman Khawaja

There are several unwritten rules of decent sportswriting. One of them is to not make yourself the story. Another is to maintain a healthy sense of distance between yourself and the subject - invariably a player or team of some description.I’m going to break both of those rules in this piece - because I have a special relationship with Usman Khawaja - e…

There are several unwritten rules of decent sportswriting. One of them is to not make yourself the story. Another is to maintain a healthy sen...

Crikey • 30th October 2025

Sports lobbying, Canberra footy matches and freebie tickets for politicians

The Australian Open and a FIFA World Cup final are just some of the sports events politicians have bagged free tickets to thanks to companies and sporting bodies affiliated with the embattled Australian Parliament Sports Club (APSC).


The club, which sets up friendly sports games between politicians, staffers and journalists in Canberra returned to action this week as parliament sat for one of the last sitting weeks of the year.Independent MP Monique Ryan introduced a private members’ bill at...

Crikey • 13th October 2025

Australian Parliament Sports Club de-registered as lobby group amid MP outrage

The Australian Parliament Sports Club (APSC) has been de-registered as a lobby group, just days after independent Senator David Pocock was booted from the club after questioning its links to the gambling lobby in Senate estimates.


The club’s CEO Andy Turnbull, a businessman who runs a sports event company, also told Crikey that its members — including senators — had been notified on 40 occasions that a betting industry lobby group was a “corporate member” of the club, with that group’s CEO pl...

Crikey • 12th October 2025

Tasmania’s $1 billion stadium doesn’t stack up. Or does it? 

On the face of it, Tasmania’s stadium proposal — an issue that sent the state to an early election — appears economically unviable. The smallest state economy in the country would face an outright cost of $1.13 billion to build the stadium, with the lion’s share of that cost borne by Tasmanian taxpayers. The state posted a billion-dollar deficit at the last budget and is projected to remain in deficit until 2030 at the earliest. 


The AFL has made the construction of a new stadium with a roof...

Crikey • 6th October 2025

SCA an unorthodox lifeline for sinking Seven

Seven West Media has agreed to merge with Southern Cross Austereo, which own the Triple M Network as well as the streaming and podcast production platform LiSTNR (which hosts the likes of Hamish and Andy, Abbie Chatfield’s It’s a Lot, and The Briefing). 


The deal, which according to an investor pack would result in a combined group with a market capitalisation of $417 million, caught many a media reporter somewhat by surprise, with Nine Entertainment having been considered a serious suitor fo...

Crikey • 30th September 2025

The gambling lobby has infiltrated social sports at Parliament House

The sports club responsible for organising friendly morning games of sport among federal parliamentarians, staffers, lobbyists and public servants has registered as a lobby group, days after its sponsorship by the gambling industry lobby was condemned by a group of crossbench MPs. 


The Australian Parliament Sports Club was registered on September 22 on the Attorney-General’s Register of Lobbyists, alongside three “stakeholders” — long-serving CEO Andy Turnbull, former Howard and Turnbull gove...

Crikey • 19th September 2025

'Got its hands very dirty': Essendon's media strategy crisis

Crisis media strategy is a fraught world at the best of times — even more so when your client is the perennially crisis-plagued Essendon Football Club. The club’s latest saga involves its star captain, Zach Merrett, wanting to leave the club after it missed finals for the fourth consecutive season. 


The Bombers’ on-field woes — the club last won a final during the Bush administration — have reportedly led to Merrett’s desire to join arch-rivals Hawthorn, a club preparing for a preliminary fin...

Crikey • 11th September 2025

Gambling company uses creepy CGI goat head to sneak secret ad into charity footy broadcast

An Australian gambling company used a CGI goat head to sneak an ad into the broadcast of a charity football game.


At multiple points during the 2025 Legends Game for Prostate Cancer (formerly and better known as the EJ Whitten Legends Game) on August 28 , the Channel 7 broadcast cut away to shots of what appeared to be a slightly creepy computer-generated goat sitting in the crowd.Australian gambling company Betr used the goat head as part of what Crikey understands is a guerrilla marketing c...

Crikey • 29th August 2025

'One death is too many': Cricket star heads for Parliament House

It takes a certain gravity to extricate a professional athlete from their year-round preparation to speak on social issues, but it takes another to do so in the throes of Parliament House.


It’s that seriousness with which Australian Test opener Usman Khawaja spoke to me on Thursday, about Gaza and gambling reform, from the back seat of a Hyundai i30 belonging to a staffer for independent Senator David Pocock. Khawaja remarks that his status as an outsider means he only gets “one bite of the c...

Crikey • 26th June 2025

As it snares EPL soccer rights, Nine positions itself to become the sports broadcast overlord

With Nine reported to have snared the Australian broadcast rights to the English Premier League (EPL) in a $180 million, three-year deal, the broadcaster is clearly making moves.


The deal would cut short the current rights arrangement — which is currently held by telco Optus through to 2028 — first signed in 2023. Optus will subsidise the deal to the tune of $40 million a year, despite losing the rights. It marks the first change of broadcaster for a major sporting code since Nine lost the cr...

Crikey • 14th May 2025

'Pretend Jew sellout': Ex-Footy Show producer unleashes tirade of online abuse

A notorious sports personality has been abusing members of the AFL media online for 18 months over the Israel-Gaza conflict, including calling a Jewish producer a “pretend Jew sellout”.


Ralph Horowitz, one of the original producers of Nine’s The Footy Show in the early 1990s and now a self-employed horse racing blogger, posted more than 100 times about other media figures, including the likes of ABC sports reporter Marnie Vinall and AFL digital news producer Sophie Welsh.He has also taken aim...

Crikey • 18th March 2025

'Lies about his lies': Is Donald Trump actually as good at golf as he says he is?

US President Donald Trump has claimed to have won yet another golf tournament: this time, the club championship at one of his own courses, the Jim Fazio-designed Trump International in West Palm Beach. 


Trump’s love of golf is well known. His company, Trump Golf, is responsible for 18 of the finest golfing properties in the world, and his relationship with two-time major winner Bryson DeChambeau is well-documented, with DeChambeau joining the president at a victory rally after the 2024 US ele...

Crikey • 13th March 2025

SEN wipes AFL great's 'black men can't swim' on-air joke from internet

Radio presenter Gerard Healy joked that it “used to be black men can’t swim” while live on air with fellow broadcaster Kane Cornes. 


The two former AFL players host Sportsday, which airs on SEN Melbourne from 5:30pm Mondays through Thursdays. On Wednesday’s show, Cornes, as part of his regular “Kane’s Countdown” segment, counted down his top 10 favourite sports movie, with 1982’s Rocky III coming in at the top of the list ahead of Rudy and Rocky IV.

Radio presenter Gerard Healy joked that it...