Gary Lineker’s podcast empire is threatening to make Match of the Day obsolete
Gary Lineker’s podcast empire is threatening to make Match of the Day obsolete
Simon BriggsThu, August 20, 2026 at 6:00 AM UTC
0
Gary Lineker has left the BBC but his Goalhanger podcast company goes from strength to strength - Ben Whitley/PA
During the various controversies that swirled around Gary Lineker in his last couple of years at the BBC, there was much debate about the value – or otherwise – that he brought to the flagship football show Match of the Day.
Was Lineker really worth his £1.35m pay packet, the sceptics asked? Surely football fans would tune in to watch their team even if Skippy the Bush Kangaroo were presenting it?
In the end, resilient viewing figures tended to confirm that the biggest beast of BBC Sport was dispensable after all. Good news for the department’s new head, Alex Kay-Jelski, you might think?
But things are rarely so simple in the fickle world of sports broadcasting. And it now turns out that Lineker’s latest incarnation – as the king of the football podcast – has created a new headache for his former employers.
The rise of this new medium – which is effectively radio with a live-streamed video – is offering the top pundits a much more convenient and lucrative option than schlepping up to Salford for a few minutes on the MotD sofa.
We have already seen Alan Shearer cutting back on his MotD commitments because he is overstretched, partly as a result of his appearances on Lineker’s market-leading podcast The Rest is Football. It will only be a matter of time before others follow.
Lineker, along with Micah Richards (centre) and Alan Shearer (right) make up The Rest is Football podcast - Garry Jones/Netflix
If you have built up a personal brand on traditional viewing platforms, as Shearer and Gary Neville have, the future lies in monetising that renown via the many streaming services who are clamouring for your services.
Not only has The Rest is Football won an extension to its Netflix deal from the World Cup, which will now cover the upcoming Premier League season, but Disney+ last week announced a multimillion-pound deal with Neville’s podcast The Overlap.
Advertisement
And so the leading British pundits line up on this new battlefield, carrying the standards of rival behemoths from the digital world. In one camp, Neville’s gang, which includes not only his Sky Sports partner Jamie Carragher but also the rest of ITV’s World Cup panel in Roy Keane and Ian Wright. In the other, the BBC stalwarts and exiles: Lineker, Shearer and Micah Richards.
Meanwhile, the BBC’s newest big-money signing, Wayne Rooney, has also joined the Disney+ stable via a new show entitled Stick To United. The first episode dropped this week and made headlines when Rooney questioned whether Marcus Rashford has the hunger to succeed at Old Trafford.
The landscape is thus being reshaped in unexpected ways. The good news for traditional channels is that – for now at least – football podcasts do not come equipped with match footage, ensuring that highlights packages will continue to attract mass viewership to the BBC.
But the Premier League’s soap opera, the theatre of debate that surrounds the actual ball-kicking, is fast migrating to these glorified bar-room chats. Especially as football podcasts generally have no bans on swearing and no sensitivity checks of the kind that a state broadcaster is obliged to provide. The informal vibe leads to looser chat; a sense, for the participants, that you are maverick disruptors.
Viral clips are the new currency of the game, and the BBC’s staid sofa sit-downs have never been competitive in this area – even if Alan Hansen’s “You can’t win anything with kids” could be seen as a pre-digital ancestor of the breed.
In recent years, Sky’s Neville and Carragher have dominated the market for shareable content, along with the reliably irascible Keane. Now, these punchy pundits are about to expand their ubiquity even further via The Overlap.
So, even if the BBC thought they had done themselves a favour by encouraging Lineker’s departure last year, it now turns out that they might have been better off with the status quo – high salary and X rows notwithstanding.
Lineker’s latest project has only accelerated the fragmentation of the sports-broadcast market, while intensifying bidding for the services of articulate ex-players (hardly an inexhaustible commodity).
Apparently struck down at the height of his powers, Lineker’s voice has been anything but silenced, while his influence has redoubled since he left our screens. Just call him the Obi-Wan Kenobi of football.
Source: “AOL Money”
