One of the more niche ways to follow Election Night in the U.S. earlier this month was by shunning the mainstream broadcasters and listening instead to—or watching on YouTube—a British podcast called The Rest Is Politics.
In an endearingly amateurish-looking temporary studio in New York, an eclectic—some might say odd—selection of analysts provided coverage for an audience of over two million people.
The podcast’s star was financier and former (for 11 days) Trump White House spokesperson Anthony Scaramucci, the sole American, who was quite a catch for a foreign media outlet invading his home turf. Alongside him was Tony Blair’s former director of communications Alastair Campbell, who before taking a job serving under Blair had been a distinguished, if pugnacious, political journalist.
Then there was Rory Stewart, an Old Etonian and former Conservative government minister, now a Yale professor, and previously a British Army officer, a diplomat, and a travel writer. Opposite from him was the eminent British historian Dominic Sandbrook. And next to Sandbrook was the screenwriter and supremely funny Guardian columnist Marina Hyde, who covers entertainment, sports, and—yes—politics.
This idiosyncratic collective’s punditry was compelling and, while also entertaining, pitched at a notably more sophisticated level than all but the most somber American coverage.
To be fair, or possibly unfair, since most media experts did the same, the panel still managed, until the results started to come in, to make a hash of calling the election. All but one of them (Sandbrook) were confident Harris would win and were suitably abashed when she didn’t.
If the election podcast weren’t sufficiently quirky, consider this: the company behind The Rest Is Politics and eight other major podcasts—including one, The Rest Is History, that is often among the Top 10 most downloaded in the U.S.—was founded, and is co-owned and co-run, by Gary Lineker, a 63-year-old former Leicester City, Barcelona, Tottenham Hotspur, and England soccer striker.
It’s hard to exaggerate how unprecedented it is for a British soccer player to have become what can only be called a media mogul. Soccer stars, almost all of whom come from working-class backgrounds, retire rich but with few job options aside from club management, and few do well in that.
Lineker’s background follows form. His parents had a vegetable stand in Leicester, in the English midlands. But unlike a lot of players, Lineker is supremely articulate, good looking, and extremely smart. He segued from playing to being a TV soccer pundit and hosted the most popular soccer show, Match Of The Day on BBC TV for 25 years—a role he is leaving next May.
He is also political, and leans, if gently, towards left wing and humanitarian causes, for which he regularly earns the opprobrium of the conservative press.
Lineker describes running his burgeoning podcast empire as his third career, and to date his most lucrative. He was at his sporting peak just before soccer players began to earn millions a month. In his era, one of the more popular ways for ex-players to see out their days was buying and running a pub.
Lineker has been married twice, and has four sons by his first wife. His second marriage was to an LA-based model and actress, Danielle Bux, and, happily single now, he remains on friendly terms with both ex-wives—which is less remarkable than it might be, since Lineker, famously good-natured, is on good terms with almost everyone he knows.
When he sat down to talk about his immensely lucrative podcast empire with AIR MAIL, one of our first questions was whether he knew of any other players of his vintage who had successful careers in business of any kind, let alone in media. He recalled only one, a Manchester City player who left the game to make a fortune in toilet paper.
So how did he come to be running one of the most successful podcast companies in the world, spanning history, politics, and entertainment, as well as starring in one of the company’s podcasts, a soccer series called The Rest Is Football?
Although he claims to be driven, competitive, and ambitious, and is regarded in Britain also as controversial, Lineker is the mildest and calmest of men. The second-highest-scoring England striker of all time, he is also known for uniquely never having been shown a yellow card for misconduct on the field.
“Thing is, it was quite hard to get a yellow card back then,” he says. “Today you can get one for ridiculous reasons. I was actually a terrible whinger. I’d always be complaining to the referees, but I never swore at them, so I got away with all sorts of stuff. Mind you, I never really tackled anyone either, so I was unlikely to be booked for a bad foul.”
Fans of opposing teams, and many followers of teams he played for, regarded Lineker as a “goal hanger”—the derogatory term for a player who doesn’t get involved in the rough stuff, preferring to trot around the opposing team’s goal, looking to score on opportunistic half-chances. “It’s true,” Lineker says. “I was a goal hanger. And you’ll have noticed the company is called Goalhanger Productions.”
Unsurprisingly, the name was Lineker’s idea. Self-deprecation of that sort has turned out to be his secret sauce, and it’s taken him, counter-intuitively, from global-level stardom as a soccer player (when the original summit of his hopes was to be a sportswriter) to a commentating job—he was the BBC’s highest-paid host—to today making millions in what he calls his “third life.”
But Lineker also admires self-effacement in others. He was going for lunch in London with Scaramucci the week after we met. “He’s got this incredible ability to be self-deprecating and big himself up in the same sentence. I love that, but also his voice and an amazing talent for conjuring up analogies that always work.”
Lineker typically doesn’t claim any genius in hitting on podcasts just as they were getting huge. He says it was just an idea he and Goalhanger’s co-founder Tony Pastor thought they’d give a try: they found it easier and less complicated than making TV documentaries, as they initially did, and were exceptionally lucky in finding hosts who had a magic chemistry. They are still astonished by their success, sometimes having several of their productions topping the charts at the same time.
“We had timing on our side, because we benefited from Covid. People were bored and stuck at home, and you couldn’t meet anyone. Podcasts gave you intimacy and engagement, right in your ears. And also, we could make the shows almost completely unaffected by the pandemic because everyone could do their thing from home.”
So what, we later asked Pastor, is the business model that has made a pursuit that was once a geeky hobby into a money-spinning media phenomenon?
It’s threefold, he explains. Advertisers love podcasts because it gives them a chance to reach younger audiences who don’t watch TV or bother with conventional media. Bizarrely, the 18-to-34-year-old Gen Z–ers and millennials, who prefer news in 10-second TikToks, also have an unexpected penchant for long-form radio conversations between a couple of people, often about some arcane historical topic.
Consequently, advertising is quite expensive, says Pastor. “If you want Anthony Scaramucci to say, ‘Drink Coca-Cola, it’s my favorite soft drink,’ that’s going to cost you $45 per 1,000 people the podcast reaches. It’ll be maybe a quarter of that if you just want to run an ad.”
“We also get income from subscribers, who get ad-free content and special additional material for a few dollars a month. And thirdly, which nobody expected, we do theater versions of the podcasts that are consistently sellouts everywhere.” The Rest Is History Live is currently touring the U.S., with theaters booked out weeks ahead of the shows.
While it may seem improbable that online audiences will listen to two historians extensively discussing such subjects as Helen of Troy, Henry V’s invasion of France in 1415, or The East India Company, the success of Goalhanger’s live shows is downright astonishing. The Rest Is History Live attracted 5,000 to the Royal Albert Hall recently, while The Rest Is Politics Live, with Campbell and Stewart, drew 13,000 to London’s O2 arena.
The British version of The Rest Is Politics typically addresses such topics as the agonies of Britain’s punch-drunk Conservative Party, the prospects for centrist politics (with a former Danish prime minister as guest), and Labour politician Alan Johnson, whom both Campbell and Stewart think might be the best Prime Minister the U.K. never had.
The US version, hosted by Scaramucci and Katty Kay as a U.S. correspondent for the BBC, might cover such topics as identity politics, why the first female president could come from the right, and, naturally, the Trump comeback, sliced and diced a dozen different ways.
Another unexpected development in the history of podcasting: It’s not just production companies such as Goalhanger that are making money. Hosts who often saw podcasts as a side hustle at first are finding they’ve become their main job.
Goalhanger keeps hosts’ pay details confidential, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, Sandbrook and fellow British historian Tom Holland are each earning up to $100,000 a month from The Rest Is History, while Campbell and Stewart are understood to possibly pocket some $130,000 a month each from The Rest Is Politics. This money is, for most of the hosts, earned from a few hours’ work a week.
“You certainly can’t complain about the money, let me put it that way,” says Hyde, who hosts The Rest Is Entertainment with the television host and best-selling mystery novelist Richard Osman. (She was just guesting on the U.S. Election Night special). Typical subjects on The Rest Is Entertainment have ranged from celebrity hair transplants and Saudi Arabia’s financial ties to Hollywood to Jeff Bezos’s 60th birthday party.
“I always joke it’s like working for a communist company, because if there’s two presenters, they give you a third each and take a third for the company,” says Hyde. “But it’s also the excitement of working in something so new. They’re kind of buccaneers, who will try anything and don’t take themselves too seriously. If an idea doesn’t work, they just laugh about it and have another nice lunch.”
She continues: “It’s really that I find [them] so refreshing to work with because there isn’t that pomposity or self-regard or any of that kind of weird legacy-media thing that I just haven’t got a whole lot of time for anymore. They’re all so funny and nimble. It makes for a really cool spirit.”
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
