For Gary Lineker The Rest Is… world domination

He was once the highest-paid presenter on the BBC, but if his exit was tinged with acrimony, everything that has happened since has demonstrated the logic of that decision, says Nick Hilton. What a shrewd player the former England striker has become...

Gary Lineker has had plenty to smile about since leaving the BBC (PA)

Is it a podcast? Is it a TV show? No, it’s Gary Lineker’s special hybrid World Cup video podcast-cum-TV show on Netflix! With news that Gary Lineker will be taking his podcast,The Rest Is Football, to New York for a daily show at next summer’s tournament, attention has once again turned to the Midas touch of the presenter-turned-king of the podosphere.

The show, co-hosted by former Premier League stars Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, is the latest announcement to come from Lineker’s media outfit Goalhanger. Founded in 2019 as an offshoot of Goalhanger Films, the company was set up by Lineker and quickly brought us the breakthrough hit The Rest Is History, hosted by the historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. An unlikely segue, for a sports-focused outfit, but one that has had enormous impact on everything from the Match of the Day line-up to the public reputation of New Labour spin doctors.

“All our backgrounds, Tony [Pastor], Gary and myself,” says Goalhanger’s managing director and co-founder Jack Davenport (not the Pirates of the Caribbean actor), “we all came from old school broadcasters.” That trio – rounded out by Pastor, a former controller of sport at ITV – realised there was an opportunity outside the BBC, and other public broadcasters, to build something distinctive and disruptive. “The opportunities we saw were in areas like history and politics, which were a lot less crowded than sports.” And the rest, as they say, is history. Or should that be politics? Entertainment? Or now even science?

While Holland and Sandbrook’s show quickly shot up the charts, it wasn’t until the launch of The Rest Is Politics in May 2022 that the brand went truly stratospheric. Back in June 2017 (five prime ministers ago), when the whole Goalhanger endeavour was just a glint in the star striker’s eye, Lineker tweeted about his dissatisfaction with political discourse. “Anyone else feel politically homeless?” he posted. “Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?”

Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on ‘The Rest Is Politics’ (Facebook)

The pairing of Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, and former Tory leadership contender Rory Stewart proved to be inspired from the off. In spite of some differences in diagnosis and remedy, they both fight their politics firmly from the centre ground, and people who empathised with Lineker’s tweet from nearly seven years ago have a new home.

Lineker is now considered a pioneer in what has, sniffily, been referred to as “dadcasting”. That label pays homage to the “centrist dad” stereotype: middle class, middle age, middle ground. If such a thing truly exists, then Goalhanger is their Shangri-La. The Rest Is Politics has been an extravagant success, with a reported 700,000 listeners and live shows selling out the Royal Albert Hall and O2 Arena.

The show has led to two spin-offs: a series of leadership powwows, Leading, and an American-focused sibling, The Rest Is Politics US, with Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s short-lived communications director, and Katty Kay, a veteran BBC correspondent. Scaramucci has described their chemistry as “like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John doing a podcast, but in character. I’m driving her crazy with my poor manners and my New York Italian accent.” And yet, at the last US election, the show topping the UK podcast charts wasn’t the BBC’s Americast. It was Scaramucci and Kay’s all-singing, all-dancing bipartisan extravaganza.

And it is the US that is proving the big lure for Davenport and co now. “My ambition is to make a really significant media business worldwide,” he told me last year. “We’ve never deliberately made content for an American audience yet, so we need to start trying to do that and just learn some lessons.” While The Rest Is Politics is a huge domestic success, international listeners are, understandably, less interested in the minutiae of Westminster horse-trading. The Rest Is Politics US, meanwhile, was consciously marketed towards British Americophiles, and its overwhelmingly British audience reflects this. It has left Goalhanger a big fish – the sort of giant catfish that bemused anglers pose with for local newspapers – in a very medium-sized pond.

Lineker during his final episode of ‘Match of the Day’ (BBC)

Since Lineker’s departure from Match of the Day was announced last year (he wrapped production on that in May 2025), speculation has been rife about where the Goalhanger project will go next. Having started life as Goalhanger Films and evolved into Goalhanger Podcasts, in late November, the company announced a third rebrand.

Heeding, perhaps, Sean Parker’s advice in The Social Network (“drop the ‘the’, it’s cleaner”) they are now… Goalhanger. “We’re flavour of the month,” Davenport confesses. “Apart from certain sections of the media who have an issue with Gary.” But those issues don’t seem to have extended to the likes of Conan O’Brien, who has recorded a special Beatles-focused episode of The Rest Is History, sell-out crowds at stadiums around the world, or, indeed, Netflix.

Of course, the US is not an easy market to capture – just ask Robbie Williams or the pioneers who first brought “football” to the States. For the 2024 US presidential election, Goalhanger packed Campbell and Stewart off to Spotify’s HQ in New York, where they broadcast all night (rather counterintuitively) on YouTube. Those livestreams (a collaboration with other Goalhanger stars like Scaramucci, Sandbrook and The Rest Is Entertainment host Marina Hyde) have reached more than a million viewers, and they mark a significant deviation from the UK general election, in July last year, for which The Rest Is Politics loaned its talent to Channel 4 for the evening. “We turned down the opportunity to go back on Channel 4,” Davenport reveals, of their election planning this November. “We wanted to challenge traditional broadcasters at their own game.”

And this week, the Southbank Centre and Goalhanger unveiled another programme for Goalhanger: The Rest Is Fest. Taking place across the Southbank Centre’s iconic site, this collaboration to mark the centre’s 75th anniversary next year will be a series of live events that will explore “the stories shaping our world – from history and politics to science, sport, and culture”.

Lineker with Keir Starmer during a St George’s Day reception at 10 Downing Street (PA)

It all rather raises the question as to whether Goalhanger is still a podcast company at all. “We are definitely evolving the way we talk about what we make, away from the word ‘podcast’,” Davenport told me last year. “That still conjures audio in people’s minds, so we’re now talking about ‘shows’, because everything we launch now is going to be video as well as audio.”

That was what Goalhanger was saying 12 months ago, and the evidence of that is now plain to see. The relaunched brand and website were accompanied by a press release that referred to the company as “platform agnostic”, a fancy term for going wherever the audience is, and The Rest Is Football’s World Cup show is very definitely being marketed as a TV show. “It’s on Netflix,” someone close to the deal replies when I ask whether it’s a podcast or a TV show. “Of course, it’s a TV show.”

But none of this is easy. Competing internationally, and with good ol’ fashioned TV broadcasters, requires both clout and resources. When Goalhanger’s PR guru, Andy Neilson, showed me around its offices in Kennington, the team had just grown from 15 in 2023 to 42. Since then, they’ve taken over further space within the same building. The company is still run with a lean, startup energy, even though it has become one of Britain’s most successful – and profitable – media start-ups.

But is it enough to cross the Atlantic? The company has just launched its latest show, The Rest Is Science, hosted by Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens. In a new development, they have positioned the show as “video first” and announced that it achieved a stunning 1.8 million full episode views in its first week. That naming recipe might be easy to parody – so much so that my local pub quiz had a round dedicated to naming them – but it has given each show enormous “day one” cut-through. All the same, it is not an infinitely repeatable process, and each new show necessarily dilutes the impact. Are Americans, who deal in brash, jingoistic slogans like – well, you know the one – ready for something as British as twee wordplay?

Lineker, Micah Richards and Alan Shearer will present a daily show at next summer’s World Cup (Netflix)

The Rest Is team will be hoping that they can offer the US something new for an increasingly fraught and polarised marketplace. On the one hand, you have the megalithic The Joe Rogan Experience, which backed Donald Trump and is likely to top the end-of-year podcast charts. On the other hand, you have Crooked Media, founded by the former Obama staffers Jon Favreau (not the Iron Man actor), Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor. They form ideological blocs at either end of the spectrum, and Goalhanger, perhaps, believes that it can straddle them.

The man at the centre of this expansion will, inevitably, be Lineker. “There’s not many people in the UK media industry we can’t have a conversation with,” Davenport says. “Sometimes that would just mean Gary DM-ing someone on Instagram to start the conversation.” The Netflix deal is proof of this. Lineker has not been short of suitors since leaving his £1.3m BBC payday, and in the American streaming giant, he has found an ideal partner: a high-profile, well-paying gig, and an opportunity to cement his increasingly valuable company stateside.

If his exit from the Beeb was tinged with acrimony, then everything that has happened since has demonstrated the logic of that decision. The Rest Is Football’s World Cup show – reportedly a multimillion-pound deal – could well prove to be the beginning of a fruitful partnership, as Netflix looks to expand into the world of podcasts. They have a new partnership with Spotify launching early next year, and by the end of 2026, they could well be a major player in a coveted part of the media landscape. Yet it’s clear that talent still rules – and may prove ever more important in an entertainment landscape flooded with cheap AI knock-offs.

Lineker has proven he’s a shrewd businessman. Goalhanger has become Britain’s first faultless podcast hit factory. The Rest Is Football will clearly be a key forum for football fanaticism next summer. The question is whether the evolution ends here, and Goalhanger becomes a studio content to provide partner content for the likes of Netflix, or whether, somewhere, in the back of Lineker’s mind, he wants to ultimately take these platforms on and shoot for a bigger goal. One thing’s for sure, it won’t be a tap-in.