Can The Rest Is Football Netflix deal succeed?

“He’s officially the top dog, isn’t he,” former Man City defender Micah Richards asks Alan Shearer.

“Well, he’s a top dog in 2025 – absolutely, yeah,” Shearer replies coyly, before the pair and Gary Lineker erupt into fits of giggles.

The three ex-footballers are talking about how Man City’s Erling Haaland scored his 100th Premier League goal in his 111th appearance this week – beating Shearer’s long-standing record over 124 appearances.

It’s a typical moment of teasing on The Rest Is Football (TRIF), a podcast that has come to dominate the market with its constant stream of episodes featuring 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 football edition into a daily TV show on the streaming service during next summer’s World Cup, taking place across North America.

It’s fresh territory not only for this podcast behemoth, but for one man in particular – Lineker. Is this new venture really needed, and can he succeed?

Fewer 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 pundits.

Even after Lineker said he would step down from hosting the BBC One Saturday night football highlights show following a string 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 which included an illustration of a rat, historically used as an antisemitic insult. In response, he said he “would never consciously repost anything antisemitic”, but “stepping back now feels like the responsible course of action”.

His post on Instagram Stories was met with outrage by some parts of the Jewish community. The charity Campaign Against Antisemitism was among the groups pushing the BBC to sever ties with Lineker, saying him staying was “untenable”.

It turns out Lineker, 65, will now be going head-to-head with his old employer.

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

Netflix says reporters will beam in from the England camp and fan zones, though there was no word in the streamer’s publicity material about Scotland, which has also qualified. Netflix is not expected to have the rights to show matches live, as the BBC and ITV will.

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

Though podcasts have traditionally been audio-only, video podcasts have been growing in popularity in recent years – and Netflix has been bolstering its portfolio to compete with YouTube. It announced a deal in October to show several sport, pop culture and true crime video podcasts 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 the show will be shown globally, not only in the UK.

Minal Modha, from Ampere Analysis, says her company’s research suggests football is now among the most popular sports in the US, a field in which American football, basketball and baseball loom large.

“For [Lineker] to be able to cement himself within that, kind of riding the crest of that wave, I think is going to be really, really helpful for his career,” she says.

While Richards is already known in the US given his punditry on the CBS network, this move “will firmly put Lineker on the global stage”, agrees Paolo Pescatore, technology, media and telecoms analyst at PP Foresight.

Big money is said to be involved. The Sun reported that the new deal will “dwarf” the £1.35m Lineker was paid by the BBC, which topped the corporation’s publicly disclosed salary list when it was released this year. While Ms Fisher didn’t want to speculate, she told us: “I do think it’s safe to guess Goalhanger will make more than the £1.35m.”

When asked by BBC News, Goalhanger would not disclose 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 about £590,000 the previous year, while cash in the bank rose from £560,000 to more than £2.7m.

The podcasts make money from advertising income, subscription fees and tickets for live shows, former MP Rory Stewart – who co-hosts The Rest Is Politics with Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell – told the Times in February 2023.

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

But when audiences can sense that big money is involved, as reported in the TRIF and Netflix deal, it can be offputting to some. “I think fans are going to be a little bit sceptical, I think they always are, [when] big money comes onto the table,” Ms Modha cautions.

She adds that Lineker “is not going to want to alienate his fan base”, though she said there’s a possibility the format of the podcast could be tweaked to appeal more to a non-football audience, such as through celebrity appearances.

Lineker helped launch Goalhanger Films back in 2014 to make sport documentaries, before pivoting to podcasts; his son Harry also works for the company as a producer.

Based in an unassuming shared workspace in south London, Goalhanger won UK Audio Brand of the Year at the 2025 Audio and Radio Industry Awards. Its shows currently make up five of the top 10 most-listened-to podcasts in the UK on Spotify, and it claims TRIF gets seven million monthly listeners.

During his latter years at MOTD, Lineker was building up his podcasting empire – the first episode of TRIF was released in summer 2023 on platforms including YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. BBC Sounds previously co-hosted the podcast but ceased to in May.

Representatives for Lineker declined an interview for this article, but speaking about his departure from the BBC with the Standard this week, Lineker was positive about not having “to tread on eggshells anymore” – a reference to whether or not he could express his personal views on social media while working for a public service broadcaster that prioritises impartiality.

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

TRIF is generally liked by listeners, though not all. Some reviews on Apple Podcasts have complain it has too many adverts, with one saying that listening to the hosts reading out adverts sounds like “nails on a chalkboard”.

“The rest is adverts,” another fan remarked in the comments on Spotify for the latest episode. “For real,” someone else replied.

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

TIRF fan Callum Ritchie, a 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 the hosts on TRIF are often on video calls, not together in one studio.

“There’s more appeal to me if they film it altogether,” he says.

So, what does the Netflix deal really mean for fans – and could it be a blueprint for something more?

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

Once the World Cup begins, he says there will be “a real scramble” to get viewers’ attention in such a saturated market. He notes how Neville, another former England footballer-turned-broadcaster, is making similarly “innovative content” with The Overlap, and “there will be so much” of this kind of thing.

“It may well be that the stuff Goalhanger produces is not to everybody’s taste. There might be people who want really in-depth tactics or they might want something a little bit less in-depth, less serious,” he says.

“But if it’s on Netflix, and that is lots of people’s platform of choice – or even more so with YouTube – then that’s where the audience are. So you will get people watching.”

What’s your favourite Netflix show, Lineker asked his fellow hosts on an episode of TRIF this week? Adolescence, they all replied.

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

Many will be intrigued to see whether it strikes success.

Additional reporting by Paul Glynn.