Imagine Gary Lineker in 2029. A foreign, but not distant, prospect. Silver hair still silver. Smile still winning. Banter appropriately pitched to a broad national audience. Anecdotes about Gazza, not Gaza, still doing the business. A podcast mogul today, by 2029 Gary Lineker could be Britain’s Joe Rogan.
The Guardian’s media editor, Michael Savage, suggested last week that Lineker’s next move might see him eschew a traditional broadcasting rival, and instead opt for the hyper-modern streaming model.
Why wouldn’t, say, Keir Starmer appear on The Gary Lineker Experience in four years time? The beleaguered Prime Minister would be aware that a three-hour sit-down endorsement from the genial Lineker is crucial to shoring up his voter base among the urbane, normie, mid-bourgeois, podcast-addled voter he might otherwise lose to the Greens or the Lib Dems. The fact that Starmer has to sit down in Gary’s studio next to a giggling Micah Richards may just be the price you have to pay to be relevant in 2029.
This won’t be an interesting podcast to listen to. But people will listen anyway.
In the wake of Lineker’s departure from the BBC – reposting an anti-Semitic trope on Instagram, even inadvertently as the presenter claims, was, finally, a step too far for the corporation – new landscapes have opened up for him. He may have lost Match of the Day, and all the security of the legacy (or, more prosaically “old”) media. No matter. Gary is unshackled from the confines of the BBC.
With this in mind, he could emerge as an ever more taste-shaping cultural figure. He has already demonstrated a preternatural talent for working out what millions of British people find entertaining, informative and delightful. And for years he has straddled the demands of the BBC (“impartiality”) with the media realities of 2025 – a universe of YouTube, parasocial relationships forged over the internet, one in which even the Pope can tweet. Where an MMA commentator can decisively influence the outcome of an election by podcasting.
Rogan might be famous for his long, discursive interviews with conspiracy theorists. And yes, he gained his capital through dogged refusal to accept the strictures of the establishment. Meanwhile Lineker is mannered and manicured – but he has the same blokeish mass appeal.
When Des Lynam left Match of the Day in 1999 – after the BBC lost the rights to the Premier League – he had nowhere to go other than ITV. Where else? What platform could confer him any public reputation? The world in front of Lineker is much bigger than the one Lynam faced at the turn of the century. It’s the world of Rogan, where entrepreneurs of the self leapfrog the old structures of the mainstream media and appeal to huge audiences on the strength of their authentic personalities.
Lineker’s empire is already halfway there. Goalhanger, his podcast production factory, is hegemonic – during the 2024 general election The Rest Is Politics (hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart) recorded 21.6 million downloads; during the 2024 Uefa European Championship The Rest Is Football (hosted by Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards) received a total of 19.6 million downloads; the hosts of The Rest Is History – Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook – are probably only days away from being hung, plucked and stuffed into a case at the British Museum with all the other national treasures.
And from Goalhanger flows a mighty river of content: the Battle of Hastings with Tom and Dom; “Has the US underestimated China?” Alastair and Rory ask; back to history for a five-part series on the rise and fall of Eva Perón; and over to Marina Hyde and Richard Osman on The Rest Is Entertainment to speculate on the yet-to-be-announced cast of celebrity The Traitors; meanwhile Alastair and Rory are terribly concerned about Donald Trump; Marina Hyde casts a verdict on whether Sydney Sweeney is an A-lister (not yet!). These shows are populist entertainment, made relatively cheaply, reaching millions, holding a mirror to the tastes of the nation in ways that the BBC could only dream of.
There are few men (and one woman) as passively powerful as Lineker. There are a few with a shorter direct line to normie Britain.
It is easy to underestimate the huge capital the once-beloved footballer and now-beloved pundit has already accrued. But he rose to the top of the two most competitive fields available to mortals, silently. And now with his podcast empire he is increasingly dominant in a third. He was, even before the rat incident, too big for the BBC. And like Rogan, probably too big to cancel, Match of the Day on his side or not; 2029 and the Gary Lineker Experience await.
Gary Lineker is Britain’s most talented man. Unshackled from the strictures of the BBC Charter – his last Match of the Day aired last night (Sunday 25 May); he will not be leading the World Cup coverage – and he might be on his way to becoming the nation’s primary political influencer: naive, bland, nice, concerned. With no Tim Davie to answer to any more.
[See more: Dickens’s Britain is still with us]
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