Max Laughton
Max Laughton turns AFL list decisions and season mechanics into clear stories about how clubs are built and how campaigns rise or fall. He covers Australian rules football for Fox Sports, with a focus on trades, contracts and the broader structure of the competition rather than one-off match reports. His work explains why decisions are made, what they cost, and what they mean for the future of each club.
AFL list management, trades and contracts
Laughton’s most distinctive work sits around AFL list management, where he spends time on the money, draft capital and strategy behind big moves. He regularly covers trade targets, blockbuster offers and contract calls, spelling out the balance between short-term performance and long-term list health.
In his coverage of Brad Scott’s comments on the huge offer for No.1 draft pick Harley Reid, for example, he reports what “it would’ve taken” in dollar and draft terms and why Essendon’s coach told the club not to proceed, centring the story on the internal reasoning rather than the headline figure alone. He treats list management as a discipline in its own right, bringing together quotes, cap pressure, age profiles and draft value to show how clubs think, not just what they do.
Season narrative, fixtures and the race for finals
Alongside individual deals, Laughton spends much of his time mapping the shape of an AFL season. He writes about fixtures, the ladder and the run home, using schedules and remaining opponents to explain why some clubs are better placed than their raw win–loss record suggests. His pieces often step back from the weekly noise to identify inflection points in the season: blocks of games that will decide a team’s fate, stretches where injuries or travel loads bite hardest, or fixture quirks that advantage one contender over another.
Instead of treating the ladder as a static table, he treats it as a moving story, showing how percentage, close losses and future matchups will influence who plays finals and who misses out.
Statistical framing and explainers for different levels of fan
Laughton leans heavily on numbers and structure, but he writes in plain language so his work is accessible to both committed and casual fans.
He uses statistics to frame questions rather than to overwhelm, highlighting things like contested ball trends, scoring profiles or historical comparisons when they genuinely illuminate why a team is winning or sliding. Many of his pieces take an explainer format: breaking down what a new rule means for game style, why a particular player type has become more valuable, or how draft concessions and priority picks alter the competitive balance. He prioritises clear logic over hot takes, which sets his work apart from more opinion-driven commentary around the AFL.
Club-by-club analysis and recurring formats
Across a season, Laughton returns frequently to club-by-club breakdowns that give every fan base a sense of where they stand. These pieces typically group the competition into tiers - genuine contenders, mid-table hopefuls and rebuilding sides - and then spell out, for each club, what is working, what is vulnerable and which list or fixture decisions have put them there.
He revisits these assessments as the year goes on, updating them with fresh data, injuries and form lines, which allows readers to track how quickly fortunes can shift. Even when he is dealing with league-wide topics, he stays grounded in specific examples and concrete scenarios, which makes it easy to see how big-picture trends land at individual clubs.
4 more sports journalists.
Aaron Timms
Aaron Timms is a sports writer at The Guardian who treats sport as a way to interrogate power structures, media ecosystems and cultural currents rather than to file match reports or transfer gossip. He focuses on sports media, ownership and era‑defining stars, tracking how broadcasting, business and masculinity shape what fans see and feel. His work ranges across football, basketball, US sports media and cricket, with recurring attention to US television networks, commentators, podcasts and the “sports bros” manosphere, and to governance, regulation and money in elite football. He writes about figures such as Kylian Mbappé and Victor Wembanyama as markers of new epochs in sport. Timms has also written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Salon, The Daily Beast, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.
Adrian Proszenko
Adrian Proszenko is distinct for treating rugby league as a year-round ecosystem, with hard-news reporting on the NRL and the off-field decisions that shape it. He is a senior rugby league reporter for The Age, covering the NRL, State of Origin and elite club competitions. His beat spans player movement, governance and the business of the sport, with frequent reporting on squad changes, injuries, judiciary outcomes, selection calls, contracts, salary cap pressure and club politics. He also covers expansion discussions, franchise bids, venue decisions, broadcast and scheduling issues, and industrial disputes. His work relies on sourced detail from coaches, agents, club officials, administrators and players, and he uses reported news, direct quotes and specific facts to explain how decisions are made and what they mean.
Andrew Wu
Andrew Wu is a sports journalist at The Age whose AFL work uses game nights, especially for big clubs, to test how well teams are built, focusing on structure, depth and pressure rather than just the score. He writes where individual star performances meet system-wide problems, asking why a side can fail even when its marquee players deliver. His match analysis treats each game as evidence in a larger case about a club’s direction, with clear, direct reporting built from player roles, match‑ups and key passages that reveal mentality and adaptability. Wu covers major codes, particularly AFL and cricket, bringing a cross‑code view of how teams manage form, fatigue and selection over long seasons. He is drawn to list balance, system integrity and whether clubs and national sides can turn talent into reliable performance with stakes beyond a single match.
Andrew van Leeuwen
Andrew van Leeuwen covers top-level motorsport with a focus on how rules, governance and competitive dynamics shape what happens on track. He writes for Speedcafe about Supercars and international series, treating officiating and regulation as core competitive factors rather than background noise. His reporting follows how race control and judicial processes influence Supercars outcomes, unpacking stewards’ calls, penalties, protests and appeals and linking them to points, grids and race results. He also runs the week-to-week Supercars beat, tracking race weekends, team form, strategy, technical changes, balance of performance shifts and the driver market. Team principals and drivers feature heavily in his coverage of car development, engineering changes and intra-team dynamics. He consistently explains Gen3 regulations, parity debates, format and calendar changes, and covers major global series through the lens of governance, commercial shifts and high-level regulatory change.