Gary Lineker: Can Netflix’s The Rest Is Football deal succeed?

“He’s officially the leader, isn’t he?” former Manchester City defender Micah Richards asks Alan Shearer.

“Well, he’s the leader in 2025 – absolutely, yes,” Shearer answers sheepishly, before the pair and Gary Lineker burst into a fit of laughter.

The three former footballers talk about how Manchester City’s Erling Haaland scored his 100th Premier League goal in his 111th appearance this week, surpassing Shearer’s long-standing record of 124 appearances.

It’s a typical moment of mockery on The Rest Is Football (TRIF), a podcast that has come to dominate the market with its constant stream of episodes starring the trio.

And it doesn’t stop there. Goalhanger, the podcast company Lineker co-founded and which is behind big brands like The Rest Is Politics, The Rest is Entertainment and The Rest Is History, has signed a deal, announced this week, with Netflix to turn its soccer edition into a daily television show on the streaming service during next summer’s World Cup, which will take place across North America.

It’s new territory not only for this podcast giant, but also for one man in particular: Lineker. Is this new company really necessary? Can he succeed?

Less than seven months ago, Lineker was working for the BBC, where he had presented Match of the Day (MOTD) for 26 years. Richards and Shearer frequently joined him as experts.

Even after Lineker said he would stop hosting BBC One’s Saturday night football show following a series of controversies, he was still expected to front the corporation’s coverage of the FA Cup and World Cup in 2026.

That all changed after he shared a social media post about Zionism that included an illustration of a rat, historically used as an anti-Semitic slur. In response, he said he would “never knowingly post anything anti-Semitic again,” but “taking a step back now seems like the responsible course of action.”

Her post on Instagram Stories was met with outrage from some parts of the Jewish community. The Campaign Against Antisemitism charity was among the groups that pressured the BBC to sever ties with Lineker, saying his stay was “unsustainable”.

It turns out that Lineker, 65, will now go head to head with his former employer.

The new deal with Netflix will see the podcast abandon its usual format of Lineker, Shearer and Richards holding varying quality video calls from their respective homes and instead resort to a glitzy New York studio.

Netflix says reporters will arrive from the England camp and fan zones, although there was no information in the streamer’s promotional material about Scotland, which also qualified. Netflix is ​​not expected to have the rights to broadcast live matches, as the BBC and ITV will.

For both sports and video podcasting, “this is a historic deal,” according to Laura Fisher, audio and entertainment analyst at MIDiA Research.

Although podcasts have traditionally been audio-only, video podcasts have grown in popularity in recent years and Netflix has been beefing up its portfolio to compete with YouTube. It announced a deal in October to feature several video podcasts about sports, pop culture and true crime on its platform.

Analysts say this could open up the show – and Lineker – to a global audience, given Netflix’s large presence outside the UK. Netflix confirmed to BBC News that the show will air globally, not just in the UK.

Minal Modha of Ampere Analysis says his company’s research suggests soccer is now among the most popular sports in the U.S., a field in which football, basketball and baseball loom large.

“For [Lineker] “Being able to solidify yourself within that, ride the crest of that wave, I think is going to be really helpful for your career,” he says.

Although Richards is already known in the US for his experience at CBS, this move will “firmly place Lineker on the world stage,” agrees Paolo Pescatore, technology, media and telecommunications analyst at PP Foresight.

It is said that there is a lot of money at stake. The Sun reported that the new deal will “eclipses” the £1.35m the BBC paid Lineker, which topped the corporation’s publicly disclosed salary list when it was published this year. Although Mrs Fisher didn’t want to speculate, she told us: “I think it’s safe to assume that Goalhanger will earn more than £1.35m.”

When asked by BBC News, Goalhanger did not reveal how much the deal was worth. Accounts filed in February showed the company had £2.03m in retained earnings in the year to April 2024, up from around £590,000 a year earlier, while cash in the bank rose from £560,000 to more than £2.7m.

Podcasts make money from advertising revenue, subscription fees and tickets to live shows, former MP Rory Stewart, co-host of The Rest Is Politics with Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell, told the Times in February 2023.

It is also a lucrative business for its hosts. The two presenters each get a third of the profits, Stewart said, adding: “It’s good money. I’d say it’s Championship footballer’s money. I’ve made more this month than I’ve made doing anything else in my life.”

But when the public can feel like there’s a lot of money at stake, as reported in the TRIF-Netflix deal, it can be discouraging to some. “I think the fans are going to be a little skeptical, I think they always are, [when] a lot of money on the table,” warns Mrs. Modha.

He adds that Lineker is “not going to want to alienate his fan base”, although he said there is a possibility that the podcast format could be altered to appeal more to a non-football audience, such as through celebrity appearances.

Lineker helped launch Goalhanger Films in 2014 to make sports documentaries, before moving into podcasts; His son Harry also works for the company as a producer.

Based in a simple co-working space in south London, Goalhanger won UK Audio Brand of the Year at the Radio and Audio Industry Awards 2025. Their shows currently make up five of the top 10 most listened to podcasts in the UK on Spotify, and TRIF claims seven million monthly listeners.

During his final years at MOTD, Lineker was building his podcasting empire – the first episode of TRIF was released in the summer of 2023 on platforms such as YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. BBC Sounds previously co-hosted the podcast, but stopped doing so in May.

Lineker’s representatives declined an interview for this article, but speaking about his departure from the BBC to the Standard this week, Lineker was positive about not having to “tread on any more eggshells”, a reference to whether or not he would be able to express his personal views on social media while working for a public service broadcaster that prioritizes impartiality.

“I’m getting on with my life. It was going to end in the World Cup on the BBC, so that’s the only thing,” he said. “And actually now I’m free to do whatever I want at the World Cup, which I think is great because we’ll be doing a podcast every day.”

In general, listeners like TRIF, although not all. Some Apple Podcasts reviews have complained that it has too many ads, with one saying that listening to the hosts read the ads sounds like “nails on a chalkboard.”

“The rest are ads,” another fan commented in the Spotify comments of the latest episode. “Really,” someone else responded.

In reviews for sister podcast The Rest Is Entertainment, some listeners complain that journalist Marina Hyde speaks too fast, while others say her co-host Richard Osman interrupts “constantly.”

Callum Ritchie, a TIRF fan and 23-year-old student who plays for Abertay University’s football team, told BBC News he likes how Lineker is “not afraid to speak his mind on certain issues”.

He listens to TRIF on Spotify but doesn’t watch it on YouTube, preferring to watch Gary Neville’s The Overlap or Simon Ferry and Paul Slane’s Open Goal podcast, because TRIF’s presenters are usually on video calls, not together in a studio.

“It would be more attractive to me if they all filmed it together,” he says.

So what does the Netflix deal really mean for fans? Could it be a model for something else?

The Observer’s football correspondent Rory Smith, co-host of the Libero football podcast, praises Lineker for his “progressive, progressive and imaginative” approach to reaching “a different audience” through a new platform.

Once the World Cup starts, he says there will be “a real struggle” to capture viewers’ attention in such a saturated market. He points out how Neville, another former English footballer turned broadcaster, is creating similar “innovative content” with The Overlap, and “there will be a ton” of this sort of thing.

“It’s quite possible that what Goalhanger produces is not to everyone’s taste. There may be people who want really deep tactics or who want something a little less deep, less serious,” he says.

“But if it’s on Netflix, and that’s a lot of people’s preferred platform, or even more so in the case of YouTube, then that’s where the audience is. So people will watch it.”

What’s your favorite Netflix show? Lineker asked his fellow hosts on an episode of TRIF this week. Adolescence, everyone responded.

Stranger Things was also mentioned: “another series is coming out soon,” Richards said. “It’s called The Rest is Football,” Lineker joked.

Many will be intrigued to see if it succeeds.

Additional reporting by Paul Glynn.