About Craig

Craig Foster is a rare figure in Australian public life: the 419th Socceroo and 40th Captain, legally trained, a broadcaster for 24 years, and a human rights campaigner whose campaigns have freed a footballer from a foreign prison and brought hundreds of people to safety. He brings an athlete’s discipline, a legal mind and a record of campaigns that have won to one conviction: that every system we build, from the law to the economy to technology to sport, must have the human being at its centre.

Born in Camden, New South Wales, with Lismore as his home town, Craig captained Australia and Crystal Palace in England. A Pro Licence coach, he led the NSW girls’ team to a national championship and coached many of the emerging Matildas generation. He went on to a 24-year broadcasting career across SBS, Stan and Nine Network, covering men’s and women’s FIFA World Cups and winning three Logie Awards. He holds a Bachelor of Laws, an Honorary Doctor of Laws and a Master of Sport Management.

Football

  • 419th Socceroo and 40th Captain; 29 caps for Australia

  • Captain, Crystal Palace FC

  • Pro Licence coach

  • National championship winner as coach of the NSW girls’ team; coached many of the emerging Matildas generation

  • Football Australia Hall of Fame

  • Former Chair and CEO, Professional Footballers Australia (PFA)

Socceroos: 419th Socceroo and 40th Captain, 29 caps for Australia

Captain, Crystal Palace FC

A life in broadcasting

For more than two decades, Craig has been one of the most trusted voices in Australian football.

After retiring as a player in 2003, he became SBS’s chief football analyst, working alongside two of the most legendary names in Australian football broadcasting, Johnny Warren and Les Murray. For almost two decades he helped bring the world game into Australian living rooms, at a time when football was still fighting for its place in the national conversation. He went on to cover the game for Stan and Nine Network, in a broadcasting career spanning 24 years.

He has covered six consecutive men’s FIFA World Cups and multiple women’s World Cups, Asian Cups, the Socceroos and the Matildas, and the A-League and A-League Women. His coverage was known for honest, deeply informed analysis, a refusal to accept second best for the Australian game, and a belief that football is about far more than what happens on the pitch. He was among the first Australian broadcasters to speak regularly about the game’s place in society: racism, human rights, governance, and who football really belongs to.

That work has earned him three Logie Awards.

Broadcasting also gave Craig the platform that made his advocacy possible. When he spoke up for Hakeem al-Araibi, for Afghan women footballers or for refugees held offshore, millions of Australians already knew and trusted his voice from years of match-day coverage.

FIFA World Cup, Moscow, 2018

With the Stan Sport team, 2026

Les Murray’s last World Cup show, Brazil, 2014

Logie Awards with former colleague Lucy Zelic

Campaigns that won

Craig’s advocacy is practical, and it works.

When refugee footballer Hakeem al-Araibi was seized in Bangkok in 2018 and faced return to torture in Bahrain, Craig led a global campaign that held FIFA, the Olympic movement and world sport to their own human rights commitments. Hakeem came home.

In 2021, as Kabul fell, he helped evacuate around 100 Afghans, among them members of the Afghan women’s national football team and 15 young university women who had hidden from the Taliban for days. Those young women are now graduating from Australian universities. Their story is told in the award-winning documentary Die or Die Trying: Escaping the Taliban.

With Amnesty International Australia, he led #GameOver, the campaign that helped free hundreds of refugees held on Manus Island and Nauru.

And in 2026 he stood with members of Iran’s women’s national team seeking protection in Australia, and demanded accountability from FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation for leaving them exposed.

Then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, Hakeem al-Araibi and Craig, Parliament House, February 2019.

International law for everyone

Craig argues that the central failure of international law is not its content but its selective application. A law that binds the weak and excuses the strong is not justice; it is a weapon dressed in the language of justice.

He calls for one standard for every state: Russia in Ukraine, Myanmar against the Rohingya, China against the Uyghurs, Israel in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territory, the atrocities in Sudan and those who arm them, the Taliban’s gender apartheid in Afghanistan, and Iran’s repression of women. He has pressed Australia to meet its duty to prevent genocide, end weapons exports that risk complicity, defend the International Criminal Court against sanctions, and support reform of a UN Security Council whose veto shields the powerful.

He has twice visited the Rohingya camps at Cox’s Bazar, and continues to advocate for justice and dignity for a people denied both.

Integrity in sport

Football gave Craig everything, and he has spent decades fighting for its soul.

A long-standing campaigner against corruption in FIFA and for integrity and accountability in sport governance, he has challenged sportswashing by rights-abusing states, the award of the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, the deaths of migrant workers building Qatar 2022, and FIFA’s failure to honour the human rights policy written into its own statutes in 2017.

His demand is simple: apply the policy every time, as a condition rather than a slogan, for every host, owner, sponsor and tournament. Sport is the one stage the whole world watches. It should be a powerful force for human rights and international law, and for helping humanity thrive.

Equality for women in sport and society

As Chair of Professional Footballers Australia, Craig championed gender equality for the Matildas and Australia’s women players. He led a governance review of the players’ association and opened seats on its Executive Committee to Australian female players, giving women a permanent voice at the top of the professional game.

He is an Ambassador for the Sydney Women’s Fund, which lifts up underprivileged women’s groups and works to end violence against women.

An independent, peaceful Australia

Craig is politically active for Australian sovereignty and independence. A former Co-Chair of the Australian Republic Movement, he argues for an Australian head of state, an independent foreign policy, and a nation that applies its principles consistently rather than following larger powers into conflict.

He is anti-war, and a fierce critic of a global arms economy that spends nearly three trillion dollars a year on killing while famine appeals go unanswered. He defends the right to peaceful protest, academic freedom and the freedom to speak against atrocity, and has warned against definitions of hatred that would brand the defence of human rights as bigotry.

A world where people thrive

At the heart of Craig’s work is a world where every human being is protected and given the opportunity to excel.

He campaigns for fully funded public education for every child, an end to poverty, and housing, food and health as legal minimums rather than charity. He argues for taxing extreme wealth and closing offshore tax havens; for genuine self-determination for First Nations peoples and closing the gap in life expectancy; and for a single anti-racism standard applied to every community without exception.

He insists that artificial intelligence be placed under meaningful human control, that no machine decide over a human life, and that the companies built on our data pay for it. And he argues that a liveable planet is the right on which every other right depends. Lismore, his home town, was drowned twice by record floods in 2022.

Addi Road, Marrickville, Sydney.

Orations

Craig has delivered many of Australia’s leading named lectures on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. His addresses include the Higinbotham Oration at RMIT University, a keynote for the Human Rights Law Centre, the John Curtin Australia Day-eve Lecture, the Victoria Law Foundation Address, the Nelson Mandela Lecture at the University of South Australia, the ANU Australia and the World Lecture at the National Press Club, the Manning Clark Lecture, and a conversation with Hakeem al-Araibi at the Centre for Sport and Human Rights’ Sporting Chance Forum at the United Nations in Geneva.

In 2026 he delivered Reclaiming Humanity, the Curtin University Centre for Human Rights 10th Annual Oration, setting out a new social bargain to put people back at the centre of law, technology, the economy, sport and the planet’s future.

Work and service

Craig is a member of the Australia Committee of Human Rights Watch and the Sydney Peace Prize advisory committee, a Trustee and former Chair and CEO of Professional Footballers Australia, and an Ambassador for the Sydney Women’s Fund and the Addison Road Community Organisation. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2021, named Australian Father of the Year in 2022 and NSW Australian of the Year in 2023.

Honours and qualifications

  • Member of the Order of Australia (AM), 2021

  • Australian Father of the Year, 2022

  • NSW Australian of the Year, 2023

  • Football Australia Hall of Fame

  • Three-time Logie Award winner

  • Bachelor of Laws (LLB)

  • Honorary Doctor of Laws (HonLLD), University of Wollongong

  • Master of Sport Management, Johan Cruyff Institute

Governance and service

Invite Craig to speak

Read the orations