'A podcast mogul? I'll take that as a compliment'

Gary Lineker opens up to Richard Jolly on 'Match of the Day', expanding his Goalhanger media empire and changing his habits on Twitter/X where it's 'a very unpleasant world'

- Richard Jolly

Many a description has been applied to Gary Lineker over the years, from World Cup Golden Boot winner to crisp salesman. Lineker has proved a master of reinvention, from England’s best penalty-box poacher since Jimmy Greaves to Des Lynam’s successor as a host who can relax in front of the Match of the Day cameras. In his sixties, he has been branded “woke” by those who use it as a catch-all insult. He has also emerged as an influential figure in the reshaping of the media landscape. “If I get called a podcast mogul, I take that as a compliment,” he says. “I have a company, Goalhanger, that has become almost dominant in the UK podcasting world. Did I ever envisage our company becoming as successful as it is? Of course not.”

The chances are that many listeners of some of Lineker’s stable of podcasts are unaware of his role, even if the business name reflects the career he pursued four decades ago. “We were making sports documentaries for television,” Lineker explains. “We were doing fine and then we started looking at pods a bit. We had never branched outside sports.”

But they tried a first podcast on history, then a second. “We called it The Rest is History and since then you could say the rest is history…” Lineker says. It became “the monster it is”, The Rest is Politics has been “a huge hit” and The Rest is Football, reuniting Lineker with his television colleagues Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, is currently the most listened-to sports podcast on Spotify and iTunes in the UK, according to Chartable. His empire has such ubiquity that the comedian Michael Spicer joked: “I’m doing a podcast called The Rest is the Rest where I talk about every subject not covered by all The Rest podcasts.”