Podcast company Goalhanger is releasing a new podcast titled The Rest is Football, set to launch alongside the UK Premier League season which starts 12 August.
The podcast will be hosted by Gary Lineker, sports broadcaster and former professional football player. Lineker co-founded Goalhanger Podcasts with managing director Jack Davenport and creative director Tony Pastor in 2022, as an offshoot of the trio’s production company Goalhanger Films.
The studio now produces two of the UK’s biggest current podcasts - The Rest is Politics with former political figures Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart and The Rest is History with historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
“I’ve wanted to do a weekly football podcast for a while now and the start of a new domestic season seems as good a time as any,” Lineker told PodPod. “Football produces major stories all the time and we all love talking about them and debating the ins and outs of big moves and surprise results.”
“The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics have really blazed a trail in the podcast space and it seems only right that The Rest is Football is next off the rank.”
The announcement was made in an interview with The Financial Times released this morning, a week after the production company announced economics podcast The Rest is Money - the third show in the franchise - with TV News political editor Robert Peston and Channel 4 presenter Steph McGovern.
The production company already produces a number of sports podcasts, including Global’s cricket podcast Legends Of The Asheshosted by actor Stephen Fry and Match Of The Day Top 10 for BBC Sounds. Earlier this year, Lineker was briefly suspended by the BBC from presenting Match of The Day following comments he made criticising the government’s migration policy but came back shortly after the BBC released a statement apologising to him.
According to Reuter’s latest Digital News Report 2023, the most popular news podcast format in the UK is an extended personality-led chat show, with the top three being The Rest is Politics, BBC Sounds’ Newscast and Global’s The News Agents in joint first place.
The News Agents is considered the main competitor to The Rest is Politics, consistently going head to head in the UK’s top podcasts charts. The production company behind the current affairs series Persephonica, led by CEO and co-founder Dino Sofos, announced that it will also be releasing an economics podcast with ex-politicians Ed Balls and George Osborne, which is expected to compete with The Rest Is Money.
