There is a giant chessboard on the ceiling above the coffee bar, black vines and forked lightning painted on the walls, and the meeting rooms are called things like Eleven, Hawkins, The Upside Down.
This is the seventh floor of Netflix’s UK headquarters in London, where every floor has a design theme based on one of its hit shows, and it is an apt place for an interview with Gary Lineker, to whom stranger things have been happening for as long as anyone can remember.
There is a parallel universe where the 65-year-old Englishman is fronting the BBC’s World Cup coverage this summer, as he has for the last six editions of the men’s tournament.
But in our universe, just over a year ago, Lineker shared an Instagram post about Zionism that featured an emoji of a rat, an antisemitic trope. He said he would not have done so if he had spotted the emoji and he immediately deleted it when it was pointed out and apologised for the mistake. He did not, however, say sorry for “speaking out about humanitarian issues, including the tragedy unfolding in Gaza”.
But it was one speaking-out-related furore too far for him and the BBC, and his planned farewell tour, which was meant to culminate in the U.S. this July, was abruptly cancelled.
Things are rarely upside-down for long in Lineker’s life, though.
Six months after leaving the BBC, he announced that Goalhanger, the independent media company he had started with former ITV Sport executive Tony Pastor to make football documentaries in 2014, had signed a £14million ($18.9m) deal with Netflix to stream daily versions of its hugely popular The Rest is Football podcast during the World Cup from a studio overlooking New York’s Times Square.
A month after that, Los Angeles-based investment firm The Chernin Group (TCG) announced it had bought just under a quarter of Goalhanger, which now has 250,000 paying subscribers, as well as the millions of listeners who put up with a few adverts every 20 minutes or so.
Neither party revealed how much TCG paid for its stake, but industry gossip suggests the deal valued what had once been a side hustle at well over £100million ($135m).
“It’s great and it will help us grow, hopefully in America, as well,” says Lineker, who is nursing a sore tooth but otherwise looks as relaxed as the last time you saw him on a screen.
“We’re growing so quickly anyway — it’s an amazing business. We’re just blagging it, we don’t know what we’re doing but somehow it’s working.”
Working? I point out that as of the morning of our chat, Goalhanger podcasts — on subjects covering everything from football to politics, history to entertainment — were first, second, fourth and fifth in the Apple charts, with six more placed in the top 40. They had a similar hold over Spotify’s rankings.
“Yeah, it’s pretty good, isn’t it?” he accepts. “But it’s normal now, particularly on the first two days of the week. Look, Tony and Jack (Davenport, an ex-BBC radio producer who joined Goalhanger when it pivoted to podcasts in 2022) run the company brilliantly. I just do a lot of podcasts and pop into the office every now and then.
“It’s a bit like my whole life, really. Everyone else does all the work and I get the plaudits. It’s crazy.”
It is a joke he has been making ever since John Barnes and Peter Beardsley set him up to score six goals for England at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, enough to win that tournament’s Golden Boot. But it is one that explains a pattern running through Lineker’s life: he refuses to let himself be defined by other people’s low expectations of what he can and cannot do.
Born into a family of greengrocers, he left school at 16 with a patchy report card that said he “concentrates too much on football” but “would never make a living from that,” which was not a terrible prediction at the time, as he was equally good at cricket.
Despite that, he turned professional with his hometown club Leicester City, before moving on to Everton, Barcelona, Tottenham Hotspur and, finally, Japan’s Nagoya Grampus Eight. He never won a top-flight league title during his 16-year career — or received a yellow or red card — but claimed cups in England and Spain, received numerous individual awards and scored lots and lots of goals, including 48 for England.
Lineker wins a penalty for England in the 1990 World Cup (Patrick Hertzog/AFP via Getty Images)
A natural communicator, Lineker’s move into punditry was not a surprise but his appointment as the BBC’s lead football presenter in 1999 was, as this had previously been a job for long-standing broadcasters. Over the next quarter of a century, he branched out into golf, the Olympics and anything else the corporation could throw his way. He also became its highest-paid employee, earning £1.35m ($1.82m) a year in his final year.
In the meantime, he fronted a consortium that saved Leicester from bankruptcy in 2002, became the face of the country’s leading crisp brand (chips, for American readers) and presented one episode of the BBC’s flagship Match of the Day programme in his underwear to honour a tweeted promise that said Leicester would not win the Premier League.
That tweet, however, caused only mild repercussions compared to several he posted over the years that expressed disappointment and, at times, anger with government policy on immigration, the Middle East and other social issues. This put him in the unusual position of being both an embarrassment and a hugely valuable asset to the BBC, as well as the focus of frequent criticism from the UK’s right-leaning media, most of whom have a commercial interest in diminishing the BBC.
The tensions caused by his refusal to stay in the narrow lane the BBC’s rivals had prescribed for him, coupled with the not insignificant fact that Goalhanger was by now smashing his main employer’s output in the burgeoning UK podcast market, led to an earlier-than-planned exit from the national broadcaster.
“You’ve got to have your own morals,” is his stance on how it all ended at the BBC. “It was like a marriage. It petered out. The only regret I have is missing the (rat) emoji. Nothing else. I apologised immediately and then I apologised again.
“I don’t think anyone thinks it was deliberate. But I apologised because it was a mistake. I didn’t see it. I’m not that stupid.”
Given his achievements, few — if any — sensible people think Lineker is stupid. Netflix and TCG certainly don’t.
The former approached Goalhanger about a year ago, not long after it had started negotiations with U.S. media outlet The Ringer to start streaming video versions of its stable of podcasts. Much cheaper than the rights to actually stream live sport, adding popular podcasts to the carousel is a clever way for Netflix to join the endless global conversation about sport.
Netflix’s first The Rest is Football show will go out on June 10, the eve of the tournament, with a total of 40 shows planned until July 19, the day of the final. Joining Lineker in person will be his regular co-host Alan Shearer, the former England striker and still-BBC co-commentator. The third member of the trio, former Manchester City and England full-back Micah Richards and a familiar face to U.S. audiences from his Champions League work with CBS Sports, will join them from the BBC’s virtual studio back in Salford (in itself a matter of some controversy in the UK). He will also make a few in-person appearances.
The Rest Is Football line-up of (from left) Micah Richards, Lineker and Alan Shearer (Netflix)
The show will also feature a couple of reporters — Alex Aljoe will be demonstrating her linguistic skills in a roving role, while Sky Sports’ Rob Jones will be in the England camp — and what promises to be a starry cast of guests. Neither Goalhanger nor Netflix has revealed any names yet but The Athletic understands that Harry Maguire, controversially omitted from England’s World Cup squad, will be busy this summer, after all.
Will the overall vibe be anything like The Overlap, another phenomenally successful football media endeavour, founded and fronted by Gary Neville?
“It will be nothing like the aforementioned show… ours is a bit more than just Man United,” says Lineker, before adding “joke”.
But I suggested to him that having spent years measuring his World Cup performances against whatever combination of talent the BBC’s commercial rival ITV could assemble, he needs a new benchmark, which is where Neville’s Overlap empire comes in. After all, the former Manchester United and England defender, who then became Sky Sports’ top football pundit, sold a majority stake in The Overlap to commercial radio company Global a few weeks before the Goalhanger/TCG partnership was announced.
The Overlap’s main podcast is Stick to Football, a round-table chat featuring Neville, his former Liverpool rival and Sky Sports sparring partner Jamie Carragher, ex-United team-mate and ITV pundit Roy Keane, national treasure Ian Wright and ex-England international Jill Scott.
Forgive me for adding to any confusion here, as all of these people wear several hats, but when Carragher and Richards were on Champions League duty for CBS in January, the former teased the latter about the Netflix deal and referred to The Rest is Football as “the podcast nobody listens to”.
For what it is worth, at the time of writing, The Rest is Football is Apple’s top-ranked podcast in the UK sports category and 14th overall. Stick to Football is seventh in the sports chart and 84th overall.
So, is there a rivalry?
“Podcast-wise, no,” says Lineker. “We’re so far ahead in terms of the football. Theirs is a YouTube show and it does really well on YouTube — it’s not really a podcast. I saw Jamie (Carragher) last week and we had a bit of a laugh about it.”
But, as an athlete, do you need an opponent?
“Yes, but we can’t play each other,” he says. “It’s like the BBC and ITV at the World Cup. I used to care about who got the biggest figures. The BBC always wins the head-to-head but you could see who was getting the bigger audiences for the exclusive matches during the tournament.
“But at the last few tournaments, I just thought that was absurd. It’s not sport. You just try to do a really good TV show and some people might prefer the other side and it doesn’t matter. Some people might prefer Stick to Football to The Rest is Football, fine. But a lot of people prefer us, which is also great. You can do both.”
You can certainly do more than one Goalhanger pod.
“Yep, it’s mad,” he says. “I never expected this. Tony and myself started a little production company making sports documentaries. Then we thought, ‘What’s this podcast malarkey?’”
The first effort was Behind Closed Doors, a light-hearted listen on tales from football’s changing rooms. Lineker co-hosted it with English journalist and comedy writer Danny Baker. It ran for two years and spawned a book of the same title.
“Then we branched out,” he continues. “Tony (Pastor) was in a bookshop, he’s a massive World War Two aficionado, and he notices that four of the top 10 were history books on World War Two. He then told me that he looked for a podcast on the subject but couldn’t find one. He said, ‘Shall we do one?’”
From that spark came the roaring success that is We Have Ways of Making You Talk, co-hosted by historian James Holland and comedian Al Murray, and is fast approaching its 1,000th episode.
“It’s got a festival every summer that is totally bonkers, it’s got loads of tanks and stuff — it’s not my bag but it’s definitely Tony’s,” explains Lineker. “So then James’ brother Tom wanted to do something on all history and it took at least six months to find the right partner. In the end Tony said to him, ‘If you were in the pub, which one of your history mates would you like to be alongside?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Dominic’ and the rest is history!’”
Indeed it is. The Rest is History — as the show was christened — did not just turn Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook into international stars and very wealthy men, but it gave birth to the UK’s hottest audio brand. And to think Holland wanted to call the show “Podpast” until he was overruled.
King Charles III speaks to Rest is History podcast host Tom Holland (Aaron Chown/AFP via Getty Images)
As things stand, though, their show is the only Goalhanger production that regularly features in Apple and Spotify’s U.S. charts.
So, is that the next frontier? Is that what Netflix and TCG are buying into?
“Everyone wants to crack America, don’t they?” admits Lineker. “It’s like with bands, even FIFA — that’s why they’re doing another World Cup in America.
“But I’m perfectly happy. Of course, everyone wants to grow the business but for me it’s more about the output. I’m alright with life. If it grows, it grows, and it will be an exciting thing to be a part of.
“But for me the great pleasure I get is walking down the street and someone shouting, ‘I love The Rest is Entertainment’ or Football or History or Politics or whatever. But it’s always positive. Having spent my life in football, you don’t always get that.”
With our time running short, I ask if this summer’s World Cup will be more like football or a podcast in terms of “buts”.
“Well, I’ve played in and covered a few World Cups now and there’s always something — the pre-tournament experience is always a little bit, ‘Oh God, here we go’,” he explains.
“Go back to 2014, Brazil. There were massive demonstrations on the streets, people were raging that they had spent all this money on the stadiums when it could have been on infrastructure, health and that sort of thing.
“The 2018 tournament was four years after Russia invaded Crimea, so there were all those issues. The last one (in Qatar) there was the LGBT situation, people died building the stadiums and there was the corruption that got the World Cup there in the first place. But all of them were great and memorable once they started, and you forget all the pre-tournament issues.
“With this one, it’s slightly different because we’ve got the main host sort of at war with one of the countries in the competition. And obviously with this ‘Trumpism’ it’s impossible to predict from day to day what’s going to happen and whether the World Cup will be affected. So, I am a little bit edgy on that front. I think most people are.
“My other major concern is the ticket pricing. I don’t understand what FIFA are doing on that front. The great thing about the World Cup, the joy of it, is the Brazilian fans arriving in their thousands, and the Argentinians, and the Dutch in their orange, and us and all the other fans from around the world.
“But are FIFA going to price them out? Is it going to be purely corporate? How can people afford those prices? I know in Qatar, there were Argentinian fans who had sold their cars to get there. That’s not going to be enough this time.”
The World Cup begins on June 11 (Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Does this mean, then, that we can expect a repeat of the monologue Lineker delivered before the BBC’s coverage of the first game in Qatar, when he described it as “the most controversial World Cup in history”?
“We’re going to be honest about it, we’ll discuss our concerns,” he explains. “But I’m not going to do a monologue because that’s not our vibe. It was different at the BBC.
“Every country will have their issues. We could talk about LGBT rights and that’s lots of countries. If I was still working at the BBC, given the fact I did it four years ago, I’d say we should probably do it now, too.
“We will talk about issues, though — the ticket prices, for example. And if anything kicks off, like (U.S. illegal immigration agency) ICE taking out fans — I really don’t think they will — we’ll cover that.”
Earlier in the interview, we had established that I used to work for the BBC, too. I told him that, while I could not speak for all my former colleagues, I agreed with most of his tweets but was often annoyed at the apparent double standards at play, as he, a freelancer, was allowed to share his opinions on social issues, but I, a staffer, was not. We talked about that for a while, and he pointed out that his contract was different to mine and he was not subject to the same social media policy.
But as we were saying our goodbyes, he brought up it again.
“I’m sorry they stopped you talking about issues, I really am,” he said. “But that’s their issue, not mine. You’ve got to be true to yourself.”
And he is right.
See More: https://www.ubirataonline.com.br
