AFL star Luke Davies-Uniacke is committed to the game
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LUKE DAVIES-UNIACKE is in the gym when I text him to line up a chat. It’s where you might hope to find an AFL player during the off-season, particularly one whose team, the Kangaroos, has finished in the bottom three on the ladder for the past six seasons.
The seeds of success in the AFL are often planted in October and November, or so the logic goes. Away from the cameras, players do the hard yards that might bear fruit for the team the following season.
But you can overdo it. The AFL season is long, the pressure and scrutiny intense. If you don’t give yourself a chance to recharge, an intense off-season can come back to bite you, as Davies-Uniacke found out earlier this year.
“I probably started the year off very unlike me,” he says, a little cautiously, as he chats to Esquire from his childhood home in Rye, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. “I was very down on confidence, and I didn’t really play my best football until later in the season.”
The reason for the form slump, Davies-Uniacke reckons, is that he didn’t mentally disengage from the game during the last off-season. “I trained right through without going on a break or on holiday, so I reckon I mentally cooked myself for the first half of the season,” he says.
This off-season. Davies-Uniacke was determined to switch off and get out of the AFL fishbowl that is Melbourne. “I decided I needed a holiday, needed to get out of the city and just get my mind away from football,” he says. “It takes a toll during the year, so I do need that circuit breaker.”
He found the mental reprieve he was searching for on a trip to Indonesia. “I was lucky enough to get up there for about two weeks with my missus and then went on a surf camp with a mate to this really remote island for about 10 days,” he says. “Basically, I surfed morning and afternoon for 10 days straight. It was bloody awesome.”
Surfing with mates has been a constant for the 26-year-old since his childhood days down on the ‘insular Peninsula’. “We all surfed together, and every weekend was a bit of an adventure,” he says. “I lived about five minutes from the back beach. We were always down there, going fishing at low tide, jumping in rock pools. I guess that’s sort of who I am today – a relaxed guy who enjoys my time down the coast.”
His seaside refuge is certainly far removed from the cut and thrust of the AFL, where in the past couple of seasons Davies-Uniacke has emerged as one of the league’s most electrifying midfielders, winning North Melbourne’s best and fairest award, the Syd Barker Medal, in 2024.
The duality between work and play, footy and surfing, Melbourne and the Peninsula, and Davies-Uniacke’s ability to move effortlessly between these worlds, perhaps finds echoes in the watch he’s wearing today in his Esquire shoot, the TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E5. “The best thing about this watch is that you can use it for all purposes,” he says. “You can train with it – it feels really good on the wrist. Then it also looks great for dinner and events. When I first put it on, I was like, It’s good for everything.”
When it comes to Aussie Rules, Davies-Uniacke, you might say, is good at everything, his form the past few years seeing him become the subject of trade rumours earlier this year when his contract was up for renewal. Pundits speculated he might leave the cellar-dwelling ’Roos for a premiership contender.
The decision weighed heavily, Davies-Uniacke says, but he eventually committed to a seven-year deal worth $1.3 million per season to remain with the ‘Shinboners’. The security of a long-term deal was nice, he admits, but ultimately, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help the Kangaroos mount the kind of fairytale turnaround that, should it come to pass, will probably deserve a Ted Lasso-like TV series that lays it on thick with earnest life lessons, stirring training montages and a rousing score. What would make it even more satisfying for Davies-Uniacke, is that he would have achieved it with his mates.
“There were a lot of things that I had to think about before putting pen to paper,” he says of his decision to stay put. “The one big factor was that there are a core group of guys who have been here since I started. We’ve created this really good chemistry and we’re all such close mates. I really couldn’t see myself in different colours playing against my mates.”
Despite the ’Roos finishing 16th in 2025, Davies-Uniacke believes he can already see signs of a turnaround and is confident the club has a raft of young talent that’s set to blossom in the next few years. “Last year we had a lot of games where we were in it for three quarters and just let it slide at the end,” he says. “And we have this next group of guys, about 15 or 16 players, who are ready to make that jump to become elite footballers. That’s why it’s so exciting and why we’ve stuck by each other, because we know how good this team can be.”
It’s a bold vision, one you might expect a player at a struggling club to tell himself at this time of year. But Davies-Uniacke doesn’t want for self-belief. The ’Roos’ time, he says, is coming.
Photography Sam Bisso
Editor in Chief and styling Grant Pearce
Grooming Dannie McDowell
Photographic assistant Dominik Scharsel
Fashion assistant Bree Pritchard
Location Santcum, Melbourne
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