Netflix is turning Gary Lineker’s World Cup podcast into a daily streaming play, lining up 40 consecutive episodes of The Rest is Football for the five weeks of the tournament. The reported £14m deal gives the company a fresh way to chase football audiences while Lineker sits in New York rather than the ’s green box in Salford.
The move matters because Lineker is one of the most recognisable voices in British football coverage, and this rollout is happening precisely when attention is at its most intense. He launched the podcast with Micah Richards and Alan Shearer during Euro 2024, and the three have since built a large audience around a looser, more spontaneous style than the format Lineker’s viewers knew for years. Lineker said the show had an “after-hours” feel, a line that fits the way the project has tried to sound like football talk after the cameras are off rather than another studio bulletin.
Netflix is also using the podcast to cut through on football programming that it cannot actually turn into live highlights. The Rest is Football will cover the tournament without showing the goals, because it does not have the rights, so the appeal rests on personality and conversation rather than action. That is a deliberate bet, and it is aimed more at attention than at replacing broadcast coverage from the or ITV.
Richards gives that gamble an extra edge. He is described as having a booming laugh that fills a New York apartment, and he will be beamed into the podcast from duty during the tournament, a split-screen reminder of how closely the worlds of television and streaming now overlap. The will present all of its games from Salford, while Lineker will be in New York overlooking Times Square, a sharper break from the broadcaster than he had once expected after 26 years and seven World Cup finals in its chair.
That break was not supposed to come this soon. Lineker had been expected to front another World Cup final for the in July, but his exit arrived earlier than planned after a series of strained moments, including a social media post that shared a picture of a rat alongside a pro-Palestine message, which has been widely treated as a fatal mistake for his future. He has also been freer on The Rest is Football than he ever was on the broadcaster’s main sofa, including the comment that England had played “sh**” in a 1-1 draw with Denmark, a remark he said no one would have listened to if he had softened it to “pretty bad.”
The next measure of success will not be whether the podcast can mimic live football, but whether Netflix can turn 40 episodes into real cut-through against Gary Neville’s Stick to Football and the rest of the World Cup noise. The company has not said how many listeners or viewers it expects, but the length of the run suggests it wants the show to become part of the tournament’s daily rhythm, not just a one-off tie-in.
