Reece Walsh: The money-making, nail-painting hype machine who could win Brisbane a grand final

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There’s a bit of Ray Shoesmith in Reece Walsh. Ray, the protagonist of Australian crime-comedy series Mr Inbetween, is a hitman with a soft side.

He juggles his occupation with fatherhood, conducting his “business” with a callous smile while also parenting his daughter, Brittany, with gentle devotion.

This is probably the time to point out that Reece Walsh does not “take care of people” in the same way Ray does. He is not an assassin, not even a criminal. While definitely not criminal, there was the punching a friend in the head (“just having a laugh with my mate”), verbally abusing a referee (“what the f--- do you mean”), and sledging a goading teenager at the 2023 NRL grand final fan day (“I’ll take your mum’s” head off).

Despite all that, he was so well-behaved at Thursday’s Fan Fest in Sydney, and so was that life-sized cardboard cutout of Brisbane’s celebrity fullback. Cardboard hands on cardboard hips, wearing a cardboard smile. It appeared warm and doting because a young Broncos fan was planting a kiss on his cardboard cheek.

This is Reece Walsh. He paints his nails to bond with his four-year-old daughter, Leila, and then uses those decorated hands to “take care of people” on the footy field. Out there, the flowing hair comes with more lair. With way more talent than your average 23-year-old and more age-appropriate rough edges that could almost single-handedly win or lose Sunday’s decider for Brisbane.

Eight-year-old Broncos supporter Mova-Jean Howlett showed her affection for cardboard cutout Reece Walsh at Thursday’s NRL Fan Fest.

An exaggeration that is not. Andrew Johns himself believes it, lauding him as “blessed with incredible natural talent, speed, skill, spatial awareness and vision” who walks “a fine line between the risk and reward”. “It could make for an absolute classic,” Johns wrote in the Herald this week. “Or a horror movie.”

It all hinges on which Walsh shows up to face Melbourne Storm at Sydney’s Accor Stadium on Sunday. There’s a split soul somewhere in there but he’s a genuine one of one.

He is the code’s money man who boasts all the money shots. A tattooed rock star and a manicured pretty boy. Just pick your polish; there’s a colour for everyone.

Broncos fans flock to Reece Walsh during this week’s open training session at Suncorp Stadium.

ARL Commission Peter V’landys has called him “the Justin Bieber of rugby league”. Which explains how he can drink water from a toilet bowl (“to recover the muscles”) and remain a marketing magnet of such magnitude. And while his pulling power earns him more than $1 million per year, it undoubtedly earns his code a heap more. It’s tough to quantify, but there are some indicators.

Walsh-related video content on the NRL’s website averages roughly four to five times the views of every other video. In 2024, the year Brisbane missed the finals and sacked coach Kevin Walters after contesting the previous grand final, they enjoyed an absurdly successful campaign off the field. The Broncos were in vogue, with players like Pat Carrigan, Jordan Riki, and Kotoni Staggs lionised for their arresting looks and irresistibly imperfect deportment.

Walsh was the pick of the bunch, and it’s within reason to call him a significant individual contributor to the Broncos’ $81.5 million in revenue across 2024 (sponsorship increased by 16 per cent and crowd and membership figures broke records).

A part of that is a magnetic social media presence that’s gained his personal Instagram account more followers (565,000) than every NRL club except the one he plays for (605,000). He is prolific on TikTok as well (426,000) and recently launched his own YouTube channel.

It’s the sporting equivalent of a constituency voting for a star political candidate instead of the party they represent. “Walsh epitomises how more and more people, especially kids and younger generations, follow sport these days,” Johns observed in his column. “They’re invested in the individual athlete, not necessarily the club or team. And they idolise Reece Walsh.”

The news cycle can churn on Walsh alone. Storylines orbit him like little planets around an infinite sun – too hot to get really close, and emitting random bursts of radiation regularly enough for pundits to label him unpredictable with predictable frequency. The predictable but pertinent question this week is: Will he win the day for the Broncos or ruin it? Or will he somehow manage both, like he did against the Raiders earlier this month, when he returned from his headbutting, bird-flipping sin-bin to engineer three tries in six minutes?

But back to Instagram, because if numbers tell the whole story, Walsh is more popular than Nathan Cleary (460,000) and Kalyn Ponga (371,000). From a brand perspective, that sounds about right. Cleary, for instance, is the game manager turned game breaker (poor Walsh remembers the 2023 grand final well), a 27-year-old halfback with exceptional kicking who has achieved things even Cameron Smith, Andrew Johns, and Johnathan Thurston had not at his age.

Walsh, albeit four and a half years younger, does not have two Clive Churchill Medals or four premierships, or GOAT emojis regularly appearing next to his name. But he does have blockbuster appeal.

It was in Las Vegas in March 2024 that Brisbane played the Roosters in that inaugural season-opening double-header. The whole affair was mostly a curiosity for locals, but they did get to witness Walsh’s exquisite skill set when he set off and deftly kicked for Deine Mariner to score his team’s first try of 2024. This is the same guy who, a month earlier, was dubbed the “Tom Brady of Queensland” and then caught a pass from the NFL great himself.

The seven-time Super Bowl champion hurled the ball from the stage of a speaking engagement in Brisbane and watched as Walsh caught it on the run. The audience loved it. The internet did too. It was apparently one of the rare occasions he had been nervous. The event’s MC half-jokingly floated Walsh’s potential for an NFL career. “With your looks and skills, you’re looking at $25m to $30m a year,” he said. “And that’s US.”

Tom Brady throws a pass for Reece Walsh.

The business of Walsh was booming, and nobody was happier than NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo and V’landys, the ARLC Commission chair, who’d used his 13-year-old daughter as his focus group to prove this “bloody good-looking” young man was single-handedly driving interest in the code among girls and young women.

“She’s got posters all over the wall of him, and she has no interest in rugby league whatsoever, even though I’m the chairman of the ARLC,” V’landys said on the eve of the 2023 grand final. “All she’s interested in is Reece Walsh ... he has a massive future as a rugby league player and as a rock star … he’s the full package. He has the looks, and there’s an element of charisma. There’s something that’s present that not many people have, but he’s got it.”

Walsh, of course, is not universally loved. Often characterised as the villain, he’s also criticised for being a player bigger than his club. Similar to the storm around Latrell Mitchell at South Sydney, his perceived power and reluctance to take part in media commitments helped feed a narrative that Walsh was given too long a leash and that had contributed to 2024’s failure. That, and the shirts-off training sessions that Walters’ successor Michael Maguire promptly prohibited in public. It was dubbed the “six-pack ban” and bolstered Maguire’s quest to drive higher standards, a successful endeavour as they stand 80 minutes away from a first premiership in 19 years.

For Walsh, Maguire’s tight ship offers a more streamlined vessel towards the complete player being slowly developed since he was an Indigenous Australian-Maori kid growing up in Nerang on the Gold Coast. In another life, Walsh might have been a chippie like his father.

Maguire describes Walsh as a student of the game. He puts in extra hours after training and pores over video footage during days off.

“The way I play, people think it’s off the cuff, and it’s just luck, but the hours spent in the video room, watching teams, watching how they defend, their habits and tendencies, my brain doesn’t stop,” Walsh said in August. “The way I play, people enjoy watching it, but it’s [about] the things they don’t see; the hours that I put in on the [training] field, even with ‘Madge’ [Maguire], going over plays, picking his brain about things.”

Reece Walsh slumps to the ground after redeeming himself from sin-bin to epic one-point win over minor premiers Canberra.

”It’s always good to have his knowledge: what he’s saying, what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling,” Broncos captain Adam Reynolds said this week. “The more we can get inside his head, to let everyone know what’s going on and what he’s thinking, the better – even if it is a bit mad at times.”

Reynolds believes Walsh still leans towards flamboyancy. “But he’s picking and choosing his moments better than in the past,” he said. “He’s only a young kid still. It’s quite scary how good he’s actually going to be. I always put stock in it when I hear if Madge admires your work ethic. A lot of people don’t see that about Walsh.”

Walters must because the word is Walsh is set for Kangaroos selection after Dally M Medallist James Tedesco withdrew from the upcoming Ashes tour. And he clearly cares deeply about his grand final role, acknowledging that his missed tackle on Cleary two years ago still haunts him.

It’s obvious when Walsh cares deeply because those hazel eyes get watery. They did when he was beating the drum to save his junior club, the Nerang Roosters, from going under.

The tears also came as a rookie 19-year-old admitting to using cocaine as a “one-off” during a night out on the Gold Coast. He was arrested, pleaded guilty, and served a good behaviour bond. No conviction was recorded. Walsh had recently moved to New Zealand to join the Warriors on a three-year deal – the same month daughter Leila was born – bursting onto the NRL scene with such conviction he was drafted into Queensland’s State of Origin squad after just seven senior outings (he did not play due to injury).

It was only this week that Warriors chief executive Cameron George revealed the toll of living away from Leila and then partner, Freda Puru, recounting the moment Walsh asked for an early release to move back home, citing a relationship breakdown with Puru. George felt compelled to grant it and does not regret the decision to this day.

“What I had in front of me was a young kid who had become a father,” George told News Corp. “I could either stand in his way from being a dad and take on that responsibility, and make him live in Auckland for another 12 months. Or we could do the right thing by the person, consider it on its merits, and let him come back to Brisbane to be a father.

“That is what makes Reece Walsh tick. You need your players to be happy off the field, and I saw it in Reece’s eyes – the world to him was being with his daughter in Brisbane, not in Auckland, and that has helped him become the person and player he is today.”

Leila is the thread through this story and Walsh’s reason for just about everything. She is on his arm and on his leg – a tattoo of a clock set at the time of her birth, and another of a lion caring for its cub. The social media presence might appear larger than life, but Walsh generally exists in the day-to-day routine of training, recovery, and helping a young child brush her teeth.

“She has been awesome for me. She calms me down,” he said two years ago. “Not everything is about footy and a job. When I am in the [Broncos] facility, I am the footy player. When I step out and see my little one and my family, I am dad.”

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