There is something wonderfully old-school about The Sunday Footy Show.
A panel around a desk. The weekend's highlights. A look ahead to the rest of the round. A bit of news, a bit of needle, Lou's Handball, and the entire panel giving it to Tony Jones while Chompers does his best to give it back. Damian Barrett with news, Matthew Lloyd talking tactics, Nathan Brown stirring the pot, Rory Sloane finding his feet, and Isaac Smith dropping in like he has been there forever.
It began in 1992 as a 20-minute programming afterthought, created because the AFL states needed something to watch while Sydney got rugby league on Wide World of Sports.
Now, 34 years later, that little gap-filler has outlasted Channel Seven's World of Sport, survived its own Thursday night spin-off, and become the longest-running footy show in Australian television history.
For Tony Jones, who has lived the show as a viewer, producer and host across different stints, that longevity still means something.
“I think what it is, is a testament to those who first thought of the concept, or at least had the kahunas to put a show on Channel 9 on a Sunday morning when Channel 9 didn't have the football,” Jones told Zero Hanger.
It started as an afterthought The Sunday Footy Show was not born out of some grand plan to start a footy TV war between Seven and Nine. It began to solve a programming problem.
Harvey Silver, the show's original executive producer and later one of the key figures behind the birth of The Footy Show, was working in the Channel 9 newsroom when the network decided to create a 20-minute rugby league segment inside Sunday's Wide World of Sports for Sydney viewers.
“The powers that be decided to do a little 20-minute rugby league breakout segment on Wide World of Sports on Sunday morning in Sydney,” Silver told Zero Hanger.
“Obviously, they weren't going to watch that in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide. So they decided to do an AFL 20-minute window that would go into those spots.”
That first version in 1992 was modest: 20 minutes of AFL inside Wide World of Sports, built around Simon O'Donnell, Sam Newman and Dermott Brereton.
“Somehow they got me to produce it,” Silver said.
“So I came in a little earlier on a Sunday and I produced this little window.”
By the end of the season, Nine's Sydney bosses wanted to turn the rugby league segment into a one-hour show. Once again, the AFL markets needed their own version. Silver did not need much convincing.
“I was pretty desperate to get out of the newsroom,” he said. “That was not my future. So I said yes.”
And with that, the afterthought became a show.
“We put together The Sunday Footy Show,” Silver said. “That was Max Walker hosting with Lou, and then it was my job to put together a Sunday panel team.”
The spirit of World of Sport
Before The Sunday Footy Show, there was World of Sport.
Channel Seven's Sunday morning institution ran from 1957 to 1987 and became part of the furniture for generations of Victorian sports fans. Footy, racing, boxing, woodchopping, interviews, panel chat, prizes, sponsors, variety acts and proper old-school television chaos. When it ended, it left a hole.
“If you look at the template, it's very much like the old World of Sport,” Jones said.
“When World of Sport ceased being, there was a real void there for that sort of feel-good entertainment and getting your footy fix at the same time.”
Nine's early cast gave the new show instant weight.
Max Walker hosted. Lou Richards sat on his throne. Sam Newman, Simon O'Donnell, Simon Madden, Mal Brown and Dermott Brereton were all part of the mix. Then came the masterstroke: bringing EJ “Ted” Whitten back to football television.
“Probably the greatest thing we ever did was to get Ted Whitten back involved in footy telly,” Silver said.
“He was a great performer. He also was this incredible foil for Sam, who everyone knew from the first episode of the show was a star.”
And then there was Lou.
Lou Richards was the spiritual handover from World of Sport to Nine's Sunday morning show: the cheek, the timing, the sponsors, the handball, the prizes and the pure showbiz of football television.
Jones says Lou brought more than nostalgia.
“He brought that irreverence,” Jones said.
“And he also brought what was a pretty good football brain. A lot of people might forget, he was a premiership captain.”
But Lou's real value was danger.
Jones remembers the late Danny Frawley once telling him he was convinced Lou had pushed it too far during Lou's Handball. For a split second, Frawley thought Lou had told a player to “f— off” on national television.
That was Lou's Handball at its best. Part skill test, part sponsor read, part live-TV tightrope walk.
The prize pack were half the fun too: the sort of gloriously specific Sunday morning bounty that could make a hamper, a pair of Acquilla shoes, a meal voucher - most likely to the Lobster Cave, a years supply of Four'nTwenty Pies, Tosca Bags and of course a Betocchi Ham become as sought after as a Brownlow.
Silver said bringing the segment back was his idea.
“The handball was my idea to bring that back,” he said.
“You're taking bits that people had seen before in something like World of Sport and bringing it back in a different format.”
The target evolved from static, to swinging from the roof, to motorised.
“It was always Lou's thing, ‘move the target',” Silver said.
The panel of the who's who
The Sunday Footy Show panel has always been a bit of an All-Australian team/Melbourne Cup field of football television.
Across more than three decades, the desk has featured Max Walker, Lou Richards, Ted Whitten, Sam Newman, Simon O'Donnell, Dermott Brereton, Sam Kekovich, Simon Madden, Mal Brown, Mark “Jacko” Jackson, David Rhys-Jones, Garry Lyon, Craig Hutchison, James Brayshaw, Billy Brownless, Tony Jones, Mark Bickley, Brian Taylor, Wayne Carey, Damien Barrett, Matthew Lloyd, Nathan Brown, Shane Crawford, Luke Ball, Kane Cornes, Rory Sloane, Isaac Smith and Danny Frawley, just to name a few.
Walker was the show's first full-time host, steering it from 1993 to 1998 and giving the early years warmth, ease and proper knockabout charm.
Simon O'Donnell was there at the beginning and later had a stint as host. Garry Lyon, Craig Hutchison and James Brayshaw all spent time in the chair across different eras, while Jones has had two separate runs as host.
It has also been a launching pad for some of the biggest names in footy media, particularly those straight out of playing or coaching.
Kane Cornes became a regular after retirement and a brief stint in the SA fire brigade, using
the show as part of his rise into one of football media's most relentless opinion-makers.
Billy Brownless, meanwhile, was just about built for it. He brought the same warmth, chaos and timing to Sunday mornings that made him such a natural fit on the Thursday night show.
Few recurring moments captured the show's post-Grand Final theatre better than Billy crossing to the winning rooms the morning after a flag, especially when it was his beloved Geelong in 2007, 2009 and 2011. He even made a return appearance in 2022 after the Cats won again, despite having left Channel Nine the previous year.
The late, great Danny Frawley fitted the show perfectly.
After a football life as a St Kilda captain and Richmond coach, Spud brought experience, honesty and heart without ever losing the bloke people loved. On The Sunday Footy Show, he could talk the game seriously, then turn around and be funny, emotional, direct, knockabout and completely himself. He even helped make “Chompers” part of Tony Jones folklore and led to his stint on Fox Footy's Bounce along with his other media stardoms such as The Rub on Triple M.
As Jones puts it, the good ones “get it pretty quickly”.
Frawley got it from the start. More recently, the same instinct has been obvious with Isaac Smith and Rory Sloane, who both came onto the show straight out of football and quickly found the rhythm.
Dermott Brereton's recent guest return showed it again. He was there at the start, part of that original 1992 AFL window, and slipped back in like he had never left.
“Derm is one of the originals,” Jones said.
“He is one of the pioneers. He just slips straight back into it.”
A place to be yourself
The current panel is a big reason The Sunday Footy Show still has its own place in the AFL
media diet.
Nathan Brown, Matthew Lloyd, Damian Barrett, Isaac Smith and Rory Sloane all appear across the broader footy landscape, where the tone can often be sharper, heavier or more agenda-driven.
Sunday morning asks something different of them. It lets them be themselves.
Brown, who has been part of the show for about 16 seasons, said the panel's rapport remains its greatest strength.
“We've always had a really good rapport with each other,” Brown said.
“We don't always agree and, to be honest, I think great TV is made when people don't agree and they have a difference of opinion.
“So we have hard conversations, we have funny conversations, and to talk about football every Sunday morning with people you like and respect is great fun.”
For Brown, that is why it works. At its best, the show sounds a lot like the conversations footy fans are already having after a weekend of games.
“It's like any mate who either goes to the footy or a mate who goes to the pub and they sit around and talk about football,” he says.
“They're not going to agree on a player.
“That's the good thing about The Sunday Footy Show. We really thrash out those opinions.”
Giving it to Chompers
That rhythm is probably best seen in Nathan Brown's relationship with host Tony Jones.
Over the years, it has become one of the show's great weekly subplots: Brown poking, Chompers firing back, the panel piling on, and everyone somehow making it to the next segment.
Both say they are asked the same thing more than anything else: Is it real?
The answer, really, is yes and no.
“He grinds my gears,” Jones said.
“And I grind his.”
Brown says he gets asked about Jones more than anyone else he works with.
“Do you really like him? Do you get along well? Yes, we do get along,” Brown said.
“That is part of the rhythm. The panel gives each other grief and moves on.”
That is the key to it. The tension works because it never feels too precious. It is part argument, part performance, part long-running family barbecue where everyone knows exactly which button to press.
The What Caught My Eye segment has become the perfect vehicle for it.
The Bec Judd almost-peck on the cheek. Chompers injuring himself playing pickleball at the tennis. Tony getting spotted tucking into KFC in the Crown food court.
All the little bits of vision that let Brown and the rest of the panel stitch him up while Jones tries, usually unsuccessfully, to keep control of his own show.
It is the sort of thing that now escapes the Sunday morning desk within hours and ends up online as a footy media gossip item.
But on the show, it plays differently.
It is not a feud. It is all part of the showbiz of it.
The Thursday Night spin-off
That sense of fun did more than keep Sunday mornings alive.
It gave Nine proof that there was a serious footy audience to be found, even without the AFL broadcast rights.
Silver said the success of The Sunday Footy Show led directly to a one-off Grand Final Eve special in 1993: a live Friday night football entertainment show that became the test run for what would become The Footy Show the following year.
“So we put together a Friday night show, which was a live show with music entertainment,” Silver said.
“We put together a band of AFL players and Trev Marmalade was walking through the hallway and I said, ‘Trev, would you want to be on this show and we'll set up a bar for you and you can have some guests there?'
“We did this Friday night show and it absolutely went off.
“It was the birth of The Footy Show.”
That 1993 special gave Nine the proof of concept. In 1994, it became the Thursday night Footy Show.
With Eddie McGuire, Sam Newman and Trevor Marmalade as the original core, it became the biggest show footy television has ever had: loud, loose, appointment viewing and, for a long time, the centre of the AFL media universe.
James Brayshaw and Garry Lyon later carried it into a new era, followed by the Bec Maddern and the Craig Hutchison weeks, Eddie's return, and finally the ill-fated six-episode 2019 revamp that nobody exactly rushes to bring up.
But before Thursday night became the monster, Sunday morning had already shown Nine what was possible. The afterthought had become the blueprint.
Going viral
For a show built on a Sunday morning rhythm, plenty of its biggest moments now travel as short clips: a Brown clip, a Chompers stitch-up, a panel exchange, or a Media Ochre target that has half of footy Twitter into a frenzy before lunch, The Sunday Footy Show has found another life online.
Brown said that is just the reality of how people watch now.
“Media is changing and how people consume their media is changing,” Brown said. “I'd imagine that most people now probably watch The Sunday Footy Show on either catch-up or they get it on social sites.
“Being able to cut that down and be entertaining for those two or three-minute little periods is pretty important.”
That shift has helped give the show a new cult following beyond the live broadcast. It now also airs nationally, including into Queensland and New South Wales on GEM, which gives the whole thing a nice full-circle feel.
The AFL show that began because southern viewers needed something other than rugby league now sits alongside its rugby league cousin, which is still going too.
Media Ochre has become one of the show's more recent additions and one of Brown's signature segments.
Like a lot of good Sunday Footy Show ideas, it came from the annual search for something fresh.
“Every year it feels like The Sunday Footy Show, we do the same thing and we come up with, ‘Oh, we got any new segments this year?'” Brown said.
“We were just throwing around some ideas and I came up with the Media Ochre segment.”
Brown says the idea partly came after a Sportsbet skit involving Kane Cornes, Damien Barrett and Sam McClure was picked up by the ABC's Media Watch and copped a pasting from then host - Paul Barry.
“I did enjoy the delivery that he had,” Brown said.
“I thought maybe there's something in that. Maybe there's something we could do from a football angle and football media.”
From there, Media Ochre became the Sunday morning media watch for the footy world. Less finger-wagging, more raised eyebrow. Less lecture, more roll the tape.
“It's growing legs and not everybody's overly happy with it,” Brown said.
“Sometimes I get a couple of angry texts or phone calls from people, but most people take it in the right way.
“We put ourselves in there as much as we do anybody else.”
Brown says the segment is put together the way most things are in 2026: through a WhatsApp group.
“There'd be about seven or eight people in that WhatsApp group who send stuff through,” he said. "We've got a great content guy at Channel 9 who is a whiz with the computer, who is really good at finding stuff and really good at editing stuff.”
And while Brown is the face of the segment, he says the production is what makes it work.
“In the end, you're only as good as the people who put it to air,” he said. "The quality of what we put to air, production-wise, I think is first class."
The Institution
Harvey Silver still watches The Sunday Footy Show and still sees the same thing that made it work back in 1993.
“I still have a lot of fun watching it,” Silver said.
“I think TJ is the perfect host for that show, and they show that you can still have fun with footy.
“That was always the motto at The Sunday Footy Show, fun first.”
That idea has carried it from Walker, Richards, Whitten and Newman through to Jones, Brown, Barrett, Lloyd, Sloane and the current panel.
It carried Lou's Handball from World of Sport memory to Sunday morning ritual.
It turned a 1993 Grand Final Eve experiment into the Thursday night Footy Show. It has taken the Sunday program from old-school live television into the social media scroll without sanding off the bits that made people love it in the first place.
It is still a panel around a desk. Still footy talk. Still highlights, news, opinions, arguments, stitch-ups, running jokes and the odd moment that only good old fashioned live TV can deliver.
From a 20-minute programming afterthought for the AFL states to one of Australian football television's great survivors, The Sunday Footy Show has lasted because it has never tried to be too clever about what it is.
A Sunday morning footy show.
Loose enough to be fun, familiar enough to feel like home, and sturdy enough to still be there when the next generation of footy TV comes and goes.
Jones says the best evidence of that is not in the industry talk, the ratings or even the online clips. It is in the people who still build their Sunday morning around it.
“I get so many people, and so do the other guys, who come up and say they love Sunday mornings,” Jones said.
“I've had mums come up and say her and the kids get their breakfast and make sure they're all settled in.
“They just love it.”
And don't we all?
