Daniel Gorringe on how he built an Instagram and Tiktok empire, social media fame and his footy career

Anyone with a social media account has probably seen Daniel Gorringe – and his now blue hair – on their feeds. Here’s how – he and other footy content creators are taking over.

At a coming together of 250 of the best and brightest business minds in southeast Queensland, a “failed” footballer with blue hair had the room hanging on his every word.

With his trademark self-deprecating jokes and scathing sarcasm, Daniel Gorringe briefly transcended his status as a social media star to become the purveyor of knowledge that this room of money makers and attention seekers longed to learn from.

Social media has become a vital tool for business growth and few in footy circles have been able to harness it as effectively as Gorringe, the man behind the rapidly growing Aussie rules content creation machine, Dan Does Footy.

From modest beginnings 18 months ago, DDF now boasts a social media following of almost 600,000 across Instagram and TikTok. It has “15-20” full-time staff and a production portfolio that also includes merchandise, a burgeoning creative media agency and one of the top sports podcasts in the country.

By design or happenstance, you have almost certainly seen at least one of his many viral pieces of content if you have spent any period of time on social media over the past 12 months.

Anyone attending the Suns in Business event on the Gold Coast earlier this month who might have been sceptical of Gorringe’s acumen quickly came around when he told the crowd, “We had 100 million engagements in the past 30 days”.

For context, the Gold Coast Suns – the club that drafted Gorringe in 2010 and for whom he was the guest speaker on this day – had five million engagements across all of 2024.

“If you had told me 15 years ago when I was a foundation member (of the Suns) that I would be back here talking, I would have assumed I was a Brownlow Medallist, a 300-game player, (with) a couple of premierships,” he mused to the room.

“But it turns out 26 games, delisted twice, blue hair.”

Daniel Gorringe speaks at the Gold Coast Suns, Suns in Business event at The Island on April 4, 2025. Photo: Gold Coast Suns

His target demographic might not be 40-plus-year-old business owners, but the 32-year-old’s ability to connect with others through humour and a shared interest – be it football or in this case, business – helps explain how he has become so popular in such a short period of time.

After Carlton’s loss to Collingwood earlier this season, Gorringe revealed he woke up to 7000 direct messages on Instagram. The majority of those leaning heavily into his long-running bit of living life vicariously through the Blues’ wins and losses.

Hence the reason for his blue hair – a loss to the Western Bulldogs – and alleged pending legal name change to Richmond Gorringe, due to Carlton’s round one capitulation to the Tigers.

Except the bit isn’t just a bit. The emotion is real, unfiltered and – crucially – relatable.

“The big key for us, especially in football, is that emotion is massive,” Gorringe says.

“People want to be heard, they want to get their voice in. They are angry, upset. Emotion is 60 per cent of it.

“I love what I do. I love the game of football. You can’t be in the social media game if you don’t love it. People will know. They will see right through your bull****. If you put something up and your heart is not in it, they will know.

“I think we look different, we sound a lot different (and) we are just raw. We don’t have the same restraints that traditional media has.”

Emotion and humour are at the core of what makes Gorringe’s content so effective. In a space where eyeballs mean everything, capturing attention is nine tenths of the battle.

But he is not the only player in the ever-expanding AFL content creator landscape.

Brothers Miles and Archie Shepherd, known by their online persona Shepmates, lead the way on Instagram and TikTok with a combined following of 1.1m across both platforms.

The pair helped put Aussie rules content creation on the map with their insta-viral videos parodying famous commentary calls, which have since expanded to other sports and brought them an international audience.

Comedians Josh Garlepp, Georgio Savini and Harry Fitzgerald are the faces of Kick it Forward – a skit-centric social media brand with more than 600,000 followers and a successful podcast of the same name.

But comedy is not the only avenue to online success.

Creators such as Cench Footy and Baseline Footy have carved out niches as easily digestible, highly informative stats-based pages that deliver insights to the doorstep of people’s social media accounts.

Meanwhile, ex-Blue and Giant, Dylan Buckley, is building a media empire as the mind behind podcast and sportswear brand Clubby Sports and its content creation agency arm, Producey, whose stable includes the aforementioned Kick it Forward.

Buckley also hosts the popular Dyl and Friends podcast, which features a slew of big names in the AFL world and skews more toward informative content than straight comedy.

It was with Buckley on the now extinct List Cloggers that Gorringe started in the podcast space.

“It was great,” he said.

“(Buckley) started the podcast stuff in the AFL world – to start something with him and test the waters with that, we did that for three years and then now (I have) done Dan Does Footy for the past two.

“That experience of trying to see what works and doesn’t work was amazing, but now we have gone in a different direction.”

Gorringe’s mantra is “be different”. In the content creation space, copying someone else is a recipe for failure.

“There are so many people covering football, whether it is traditional media or content creators, so the thing I always say is, how can we do it differently? How can we do it better than everyone else?” he explains.

“Whether that is a tattoo, dyeing my hair, whatever it might be, we are trying to find a way to be different and bring people in and along for the journey.

“You always have to be aware of what people are doing; what avenue or take they are going to have. But I always say to my team, let’s stay with what we do really well.

“Is the piece of content and what we are doing, do people engage with it and share it around? And if there is an answer in there that is no, then we don’t do it.

“Rivalry is good. It is always good to have someone up your backside and putting pressure on with the content they are doing. I think the biggest thing for me is I don’t take this for granted at all.

“I know that there are people coming up and making content because the space is so big, so I take every day like someone is going to rip it off me. That keeps me in the mindset to push the limits and find the next thing to do.”

For six months of each year, Gorringe is all-in on AFL content. His phone might as well be surgically secured to the palm of his hand. After all – if you are not first, you are last.

So how does he deal with being plugged in 24/7? With the semi-constant stream of abuse from faceless keyboard warriors?

“It comes down to create, don’t consume,” he says.

“I’m very big on creating content and then I get out. My world is my wife, my family and my friends. As much as I need to dive into the DDF world and pull out bits that are engaging and put back bits that are engaging, I have a very small, true circle that keeps me very grounded. Otherwise you start drinking your own bathwater.

Daniel Gorringe takes a screamer against the Western Bulldogs in 2011.

“I used to always want to be loved … by fans, players, the media. And since I’ve grown up I’ve just worked out that people aren’t going to like you. People will find a reason not to like you and that is OK.

“I try to stay as grounded as possible. It does help being a horrible footballer. I mean, if I was a good footballer, I think I would have a bigger ego. I know how hard this game is.”

But behind the scathing self-critique of his short-lived AFL career, Gorringe regrets not working harder to succeed at his first love.

“I knew with football that I wasted it. Now I’ve been lucky enough to be put in such a good position where I know I don’t want to lose it again,” he says.

“So I’m doing everything I can to make sure that doesn’t slip.

“There is a real fear in me that I don’t want this to be like my playing career, where I knew straight away I was in a (good) spot and let it go. That keeps me grounded and driven.

“Inevitably there will be a time where a 45-year-old Dan Gorringe dyeing his hair blue and getting tattoos is not going to have the same impact. So it is like, ‘OK, if this window is a 10-year window, let’s do as much as we can, as quickly as we can and as good as we can’.

“There will be a time we have to pivot and add and build and make sure we are set up for the next phase. But at the moment we are just having fun being content creators along for the ride.”