In a high-rise building overlooking New York’s Times Square, a studio is currently under construction from which Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer will be Netflix’s faces of the World Cup.
Floor-to-ceiling windows behind them will reveal the neon lights and dazzling carnival of tournament fans, and cameras will pan around a set created by Emmy award-winning designer Joe Celli. The kind of setting we’ve come to expect of Britain’s established broadcasters at every big tournament.
It’s a measure of the transformation of sports media that the set is being built for Lineker and Shearer to record their The Rest Is Football chat show for Netflix and that the third member of their familiar trio, Micah Richards, will be joining from a studio back in Salford because the BBC, the World Cup broadcaster he is contracted to, aren’t fronting coverage of the greatest sports show on earth from the US, until the later stages at least.
If Lineker were still at the BBC, he, too, would have been presenting games against a backdrop of Salford Quays, rather than one of the most iconic locations in the US.
‘He would have loved to have done the World Cup with the BBC, but he’s really pleased we’ve found a way for him to be in New York and part of it,’ says Tony Pastor, Lineker’s business partner at Goalhanger, the company which in 2023 spun the football show out of a hugely successful stable of podcasts which include The Rest Is History and The Rest Is Politics.
The BBC and ITV will screen games, yet Goalhanger’s Netflix deal – valued at around £14million, much of which it is re-investing in costs, including the recruitment of two reporters for the series of 40 daily shows – demonstrates that content beyond the matches is where the action lies now. Netflix do not have rights to show clips of the tournament’s goals in the new show, which is entirely driven by the conversation.
Gary Lineker with his fellow The Rest Is Football cast members Micah Richards (centre) and Alan Shearer (right)
Lineker will be presenting a series of 40 daily The Rest Is Football shows which will be shown on Netflix
The 65-year-old was on the ground in Qatar with the BBC at the 2022 World Cup – and will be in the host nation again this year, unlike his former colleagues
The pursuit of new audiences – one mainly made up by people in their 20s and early 30s in The Rest Is Football’s case – has seen Gary Neville’s The Overlap, which includes the Stick to Football show he hosts with Roy Keane, Jamie Carragher and Ian Wright, bought by Global Media Group.
That, in turn, led last week to The Overlap buying controversial Manchester United podcaster Mark Goldbridge’s two YouTube channels in a seven-figure sum. Neville said The Overlap was aiming for ‘the noise segment’.
Not exactly Goalhanger’s style, but they certainly have profound respect for Neville, whose own hosts will join a battle for World Cup audiences by recording 12 Stick to Football World Cup shows around their own ITV commitments this summer – also from New York.
There certainly seems to be a competitive element to all this, reflecting what these hosts always brought to the football field. Richards joked of ‘podcast wars’ after Carragher bantered that The Rest Is Football was ‘the podcast that no one listens to’. Lineker wryly claimed not to recall the name of their rival’s show.
The Rest Is Football is certainly some distance ahead. It leads its rival by three places on the Apple football podcast chart (which it tops), and the overall Spotify podcast chart. Though Stick to Football, which launched in 2023 as a YouTube product, has more views on that platform, it was Lineker’s show’s seven million monthly downloads which brought Netflix to its door.
When the streamer’s UK commissioning office contacted Goalhanger last year to ask them for a meeting on an unspecified topic, Pastor, Lineker and co-founder Jack Davenport, a former BBC executive, thought it would be some kind of commercial approach for The Rest Is History – whose aggregate Apple, Spotify and YouTube audience makes it the world’s third largest podcast. Pastor even found himself pitching that show’s merits in a meeting room at the US media company’s offices in Soho. ‘That sounds good,’ Netflix told him. ‘But it’s your football show we want.’
Football tournament summers have not been an easy time for companies like Netflix, who find themselves temporarily out of the picture because consumers are too absorbed by the sport to select their usual drama or documentary offerings.
‘Netflix don’t have a way to entirely capture that audience because, of course, they don’t have the live games,’ Pastor tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘But they want to be part of the conversation and have a daily offering, which gives their audience a reason to turn on each day and not park the channel for six weeks.’
The Rest Is Football is some distance ahead of Gary Neville’s Stick To Football podcast and it was the show’s seven million monthly downloads which brought Netflix to its door
Richards will contribute to the show from Salford as he is still contracted to the BBC
The appeal to Netflix lay in the growth of a show which had largely been an audio product until a seismic shift during the 2024 Euros, when its hosts’ discussion of England during their daily show from a Berlin Airbnb – and Lineker’s description of the team as ‘sh*t’ – dominated the news agenda and was even put to Gareth Southgate and Harry Kane in press conferences. For the first time, most people took in the show in video form. It seemed proof that you don’t need broadcasting rights to make an impact.
The Rest Is Football has since continued to build audiences through visual acquisitions – including rights to screen La Liga goals, Premier League archive footage and Getty Images. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos recently pointed out that ‘podcasts have become a lot more video-forward’. They are also a lot cheaper to make than premium TV.
Netflix have largely left it to Goalhanger to decide how they take the format to the World Cup. The aim is to keep the same informality which allows Lineker, Shearer and Richards to take their relentless daily personal WhatsApp exchanges on football into the studio. (Pastor, who is also on their Rest Is Football group, will sometimes mute notifications if there’s a big controversy flying around.)
But the decision has been taken to reinvest the money heavily in a more substantial form of the show, in an attempt to seize the opportunity and recruit new audiences, particularly in the US.
Rob Jones, known for his Sky Sports reporting, will be covering England and Alex Aljoe, the multi-lingual football presenter, will be a roving reporter. Both will appear on the programme from external locations. ‘It’s going to take on some of the trappings of high-end TV,’ says Pastor.
One of the early shows, before the tournament’s opening game between Mexico and South Africa in Mexico City’s iconic Azteca Stadium, will feature Lineker’s pre-filmed return last year to the ground – scene of the legendary 1986 Maradona ‘Hand of God’ game in which he played and scored. It was the first time Lineker had been back to Mexico since that hot June, 40 years ago.
The BBC have got competing priorities. We can just effectively talk about the World Cup until we’re exhausted by it
There is no intention to enter the newsgathering fray amid the tournament’s inevitable controversies and so dilute the conversation which Netflix have bought into. Goalhanger’s biggest investment has been in the studio – with New York selected because the time zone is better suited to the 45- to 60-minute shows which will be pre-recorded late in the US evening, to capture reaction to all but the 2am games.
There will be big-name studio guests, with the stipulation – strongly felt by Lineker – that they must be authentic, football-absorbed people and not simply those who are ‘doing the rounds’. It’s safe to assume that New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avid Arsenal fan, will feature.
Lineker was disappointed to be told by the BBC that he would not be kept on for one last World Cup. But he finds himself with far more scope to discuss the tournament than he would have done, had the BBC not changed course and parted company with him. The Netflix collaboration has come after The Rest Is Football’s distribution deal with BBC Sounds came to an end, as a result of that severance.
‘The one thing they can’t get on ITV, and to some degree on the BBC, is long conversations in which you can go deep into something – because television is just unforgiving like that,’ Pastor says. ‘You’ve got to do features, interviews, commercial breaks on ITV, show the game. The BBC have also got competing priorities. We can just effectively talk about the World Cup until we’re exhausted by it.’
Lineker will revisit Mexico’s Azteca Stadium, the scene of Diego Maradona’s 1986 ‘Hand of God’ goal, to do a piece for his show
Lineker (second left) scores against Argentina in that World Cup quarter-final game which England lost. It will be his first trip back to Mexico since that match 40 years ago
There are other players in this space. The American Men in Blazers show, fronted by British-American Roger Bennett, which has introduced millions of Americans to the Premier League, raised $15million to support its roadshow of live pre-game shows, with a company co-founded by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney to buy Wrexham among the investors.
Goalhanger’s first external investment by the LA-based Chernin Group – now minority shareholders of a business that only four years ago consisted of six people above a coffee shop in south London – has also given it the means to invest in bigger projects.
The BBC have their own reasons for presenting the World Cup from Salford, but both Goalhanger and The Overlap seem to agree that a presence in the host country is necessary to capture the essence of the tournament and bring it into the homes and headphones of those who cannot travel.
‘We need to be on the ground to create the best content. People can tell when you’re not there and it just doesn’t work as well,’ Neville said last week when announcing his company’s 12 shows. Goalhanger trekked around 12 possible Manhattan studio venues before settling on the one which six-time Emmy winner Celli, who has designed the look of the Oscars, is working on. They, too, say they want to capture ‘the colour and the outstanding sense of the tournament’ by being out there.
The irony of Lineker’s BBC departure opening up his route to the US this summer is unmistakable. ‘He and the World Cup are synonymous,’ says Pastor. ‘Ten goals in the tournament and 40 years since that amazing day in the Azteca: Maradona, the Hand of God, him pulling a goal back for England. He says that World Cup changed his life. This takes him all the way back, full circle.’
