Projections are displayed on the Flinders Street station ahead of an NFL football game between the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers in Melbourne, Australia, shown on Sept. 7, 2026.
Projections are displayed on the Flinders Street station ahead of an NFL football game between the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers in Melbourne, Australia, shown on Sept. 7, 2026.
Nobody within the San Francisco 49ers beat knows how to turn themselves into a story the way Grant Cohn does. So it was only natural that the veteran sportswriter became the center of attention in Australia for the Niners’ international season opener.
Cohn is not the only Niners reporter who flew down to cover the Week 1 matchup against the Los Angeles Rams in Melbourne on Thursday, but he’s the only one who’s made headlines doing so. His videos that show him eating local Chinese food, trying pub meal deals and watching Australian rules football (AFL) have garnered the attention of football fans beyond those in 49ers circles.
These posts have even gotten him attention from local media, where he compared his safari through Australia’s culinary and cultural experiences to showing people that there’s oxygen on the moon. It’s reminiscent of when European journalists, or fans like the viral X account FreddyLA7, came to the United States during the World Cup and their own food-based excursions took over the internet.
American reporter @grantcohn shares his views on Australian culture 😂🇦🇺 pic.twitter.com/XID1Rg9ghx
— Trent Kniese (@trent_kniese) September 7, 2026
A few games into the #AFLFinals and @NFL journalist @grantcohn is hooked 🙌 pic.twitter.com/fWmD4oQGtC
— AFL (@AFL) September 7, 2026
“I think Americans might be a little bit more interested in what Australia is like than what’s gonna happen in this game,” Cohn told 9News Melbourne’s Trent Kniese. “Maybe that’ll change in a few days, but right now it’s like I’m reporting from the moon — is there air there? Is there oxygen? Wow, there’s oxygen in Australia. It’s incredible.”
For those who have followed Cohn’s work, this is a bit of a zag to his normal content, which is usually hard-nosed criticism of the 49ers. To particularly online Niners fans, he has facetiously referred to himself as the team’s “quality control coach” while serving as the foil to San Francisco Standard reporter David Lombardi’s more homer-friendly take on the beat. This reputation has led to confrontations and criticism from multiple players, including Arik Armstead, Javon Kinlaw and Kyle Juszczyk.
In all of those instances, he turned the feuds into content for his YouTube channel. Against Kinlaw — whom he went back and forth with not just at the team facility but on a livestream as well — Cohn reveled in the attention, smiling as the now-Commanders player hurled insult after insult at him and using a screenshot from that interaction as his avatar on X. Against Juszczyk, he made two separate videos addressing the veteran fullback’s single post about him and insisted in one that he does not “want to look at [Juszczyk’s] ass, or any player’s ass” in the team locker room.
This is all part of the Cohn family business. Lowell Cohn, Grant’s father, was a longtime sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. Fans might remember the spat he got into with former Niners coach Chip Kelly over the attention that ex-quarterback Colin Kaepernick got after games where, during the national anthem, he kneeled in protest of police brutality in the U.S. Those with a longer memory will also recall the time that Lowell Cohn compared PED users in baseball to murderers.
That energy seems to be on hold, for now at least, as Grant Cohn is able to look on the bright side of life while covering the Niners thanks to his Australian experiences.
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Sep 8, 2026|Updated Sep 8, 2026 12:53 p.m.