‘I’M VERY COMFORTABLE BEING UNANSWERABLE TO ANYONE’

‘It’s been win-win all the way’

Player, pundit, Pod God… How Gary Lineker reinvented himself (again)

If there is an English dream, Gary Lineker has lived it. You can lop his adult life neatly into three slabs, any of which would make him one of Britain’s great success stories: the market trader’s lad from Leicester who captained England and played for Barcelona…

‘I have a lot of female friends who I get on really well with, 

so that’s satisfying because I love female company’

Football may be a game of two halves, but Gary Lineker’s remarkable life is a tale of three careers: goal-scoring legend, television host and now podcast god. As the nation’s favourite son starts this third chapter, he opens up about luck, mortality and political provocation

30 Aug 2026 - The Observer Magazine

By GEORGE SIMMS

The Kaiser of crisps who transitioned relatively seamlessly into a televisual colossus. Now, he’s taken on the role of Pod God as co-owner of Goalhanger, named Britain’s fastest-growing business by the Sunday Times, which currently produces four of Spotify’s top nine podcasts. He’s even breaking America via Netflix’s deal to stream a video version of his The Rest is Football podcast for the World Cup, now extended for the Premier League season. His existence has been one of perpetual progress, the Kendall Roy’s birthday party of lives: all killer, no filler.

We meet twice in mid-august, in fervid heat that further infuriates Lineker about climate change, first in a concrete studio in Dalston, then crammed into the karaoke booth of a vacuous central London sports bar. He’s softly spoken as you can only be if everyone is always listening to you, coupled with spending much of the past three decades mic-ed up. He has nailed dressing well without obviously trying, and today has got the late-era Lineker look down pat: thick Gucci glasses and plaid shirts, the hallmark quiff snowier than it once was, but holding firm.

Now 65, and just over a year post-bbc defenestration, Lineker’s third act has begun in earnest. “I’m enjoying this as much as any of them, if not more,” he said. “When you’re a footballer, or even talking about football, there will always be people who disagree with you, and you get this abuse. With the podcasts, everywhere in the street people go: ‘I love The Rest is Entertainment. Tom [Holland] and Dominic [Sandbrook] are amazing on The Rest is History. I love you guys on football.’ There’s no negative. Work-wise, it’s probably the most enjoyable and refreshing part.”

Today, Goalhanger claims over 250,000 paying subscribers and employs more than 80 people – earlier this year, they sold a minority stake to an American investor, valuing the company at around £100m. They anticipate a billion listeners in 2026 alone, and in September the Southbank Centre will host The Rest is Fest, a weekend of live podcast recordings and audience events. “It’s been just win-win all the way,” Lineker said. “I sit down with Tony [Pastor, former ITV sport controller and Goalhanger co-owner] and we just go, ‘How the fuck has this happened?’”

The Overlap, the podcast company partowned by ex-manchester United full-back Gary Neville, has recently made a similar agreement to The Rest is Football £14m Netflix deal with Disney+. “I take it as a huge compliment that he’s trying to copy us,” Lineker laughs. “Obviously The Rest is… series has been copied by Gary and Piers Morgan, not quite as successfully, but they’re both trying their best.”

But still not quite willing or able to quit traditional TV, our second meeting is at a launch event for The Box, the new Saturday night ITV game show he’s presenting, a Norwegian concept that mixes elements from Taskmaster and Traitors. It’s an exhibition of wry Gary, side-eye Gary, smug I’m-famous-enough-to-not-need-to-jump-into-a-river-on-live-tv-but-graeme-souness-isn’t Gary. “I’ve got myself in a position where I can just do what I want,” he grins. “I didn’t necessarily need to do The Box, but I really liked the idea, and I’d never done anything like that before. It’s not often there’s something fun and different you can do when you’re in your mid-60s.” Both he and ITV getting one over the BBC in the process is just a bonus.

Few people have ever aged better than Lineker. I ask which devil he promised his soul, after I find myself telling him he looks “fucking amazing”. He laughs it off, but he really does, Ferris Bueller youth melting into perhaps the consummate silver foxhood. He’s just shy of 40 years older than me and in better shape than I’ve ever been. He sees a personal trainer three times a week, alongside a Pilates session, resulting in ship-rope forearms. He doesn’t enjoy training – never has – but it’s better than “the alternative”. His PT is two years older than him, and also trains two of his sons, but they’re “nowhere near me” in the gym. “[The secret is] fitness. Strength is really important as you get older, and good genes.” He discovered recently his mother’s side of the family has Spanish and French ancestry, hence the olive skin, which was enough to incite occasional racial abuse in 1970s Leicester.

He’s been thinking about dying more and more of late. “I’ve definitely noticed ageing since I turned 65,” he said. “Knees a bit creakier, hips a bit creakier. I always thought if I could get to maybe 80, living in a relatively healthy, fit state – not lose my marbles – and then just go overnight, I’d take that. I’m not worried about death. It’s the suffering along the way. Particularly for footballers, we’re all worried about the possible onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s. But just get me to Switzerland if it gets that bad. I’ve got no interest in growing old like that.”

His second divorce – from Danielle Bux, an actress 19 years his junior – was a decade ago, and despite “the odd date, a few short relationships,” he’s been single since. “I’ve become very comfortable being unanswerable to anyone. Call that selfish if you want, I don’t feel I need someone in my life. I have a lot of female friends who I get on really well with, so that’s satisfying because I love female company. But it’s the other bit that comes with it,” he giggles like a puckish schoolboy. “I’m quite happy to be without that.”

In 2019, he called himself “unbelievably fussy” and “not massively into sex”. He believes his testosterone levels have dropped since and interest has waned further. He doesn’t foresee another long-term relationship, but is open to a “thunderclap”. He worries about burdening a partner or his kids with his potential care, especially when he’s able to pay his own way.

Lineker’s second son, Harry, and wife, Annabelle, have a daughter due later this year, around Gary’s birthday in late November. He used to tell his four boys – all from his first marriage to actress Michelle Cockayne, whose grandmother lived next door to Lineker’s when they first met – that the first to make him a grandfather was out of the will, but at 65 he’s ready.

Harry and Annabelle only live 10 minutes from his Barnes home, and while he doesn’t want to be a full-time grandparent, he’s aware he will be “the resident babysitter for a while.” “I’m very much looking forward to it,” he says. “But I do have concerns thinking, ‘What a time to bring a child into the world.’ Which one of the things do we worry about? Do we worry about AI? Do we worry about the climate? Do we worry about blowing ourselves up in some kind of war?”

An enduring fascination of Lineker’s life has been his younger brother Wayne, perhaps the defining nepo-sibling. While Gary stayed in school until 16, Wayne left at 14 to man the family fruit and veg stall in Leicester Market, before opening Lineker’s, a Tenerife sports bar, in 1988, subsidised by his older brother. He spent two and a half years in prison in 2006 for tax fraud, but now owns clubs across southern Europe and Dubai and has 1.2m Instagram followers, only 200,000 behind his brother.

Retiring as presenter of Match of the Day in 2022 

after a Man City v Liverpool FA Cup semi-final

They are a fascinating study in genetics and social conditioning – Gary has said he is more like their mother, Wayne their father, and called his younger brother the more talented footballer by a distance. While they were close into their 40s – in 1996 Gary said “apart from my wife and children, I am closer to Wayne than anyone” – until last year they hadn’t really spoken for almost two decades. Wayne once said this was because he didn’t get on with Gary’s ex-wife Danielle Bux, and he didn’t attend their 2009 wedding. After a 60-day drug and alcohol binge last summer, Wayne checked into rehab and has been sober since, though during rehab his immune system crashed and he contracted pneumonia, which nearly killed him.

The brothers chatted at Gary’s son’s and Wayne’s daughter’s weddings last summer, and were pictured together for the first time since the late 2000s. “We just live different lives, really,” Gary explained. “You have falling-outs, and then you look at the bigger issues. I see him every now and again. Wayne’s a different human being, by his own admission, than I am. Just because we’re brothers, doesn’t mean to say you have to be really close forever. We were close when I was young, and then we just grew apart. But we’re OK. I think he’s got himself back on track, which has helped.” Wayne told Spencer Matthews earlier this year, that “our friendship’s got back to how it was,” but Gary is more reticent.

Lineker says he’s never struggled with his mental health, and doesn’t believe he’s experienced clinical depression. He’s had therapy a few times, though, and recommends it. Talking has helped navigate his life’s few defined lows – his first son George’s diagnosis of myeloid leukaemia at two months old, the ensuing dreams of little white coffins as Lineker was told multiple times over seven months that he was unlikely to survive the night; his parents Margaret and Barry’s deaths in 2015 and 2017 respectively (although he said he found losing his dog a few years ago even harder), and his two divorces. “Going through a divorce in public is really difficult, because they make it feel like you’ve committed a crime when you’re basically just sorting your life out.”

He also claims to rarely, if ever, lose his temper, and to not feel nerves. He moved to Barcelona and within two years spoke Spanish well enough to commentate on La Liga matches. He doesn’t get hangovers, even though he said his liver needs a rest after spending the World Cup in New York.

At 18, he ran the 100m in 10.5 seconds, a second off the world record. If he wasn’t a footballer, he would have played cricket, captaining the Leicestershire Schools team from 11 to 16. I ask what he’s bad at, apparently “dancing, singing, anything musical, anything artistic, can’t paint, can’t draw. Maybe you could say I’m not that great at being married, but I think they’ve both been successful marriages.” Yet, he even seems good at being divorced – he calls Danielle his “best mate”, and even gets on well with her new husband. Maybe he’s just good at telling the world what they want to hear, but he has largely done so with remarkable consistency for four decades. He says he’s not a control freak but “likes being in control of myself” and that “I tend to focus on my strengths rather than address my weaknesses.”

In a high-performance world, Lineker seems an increasingly rare exponent of the idea that “You can have ambition, a desire to be as good as you can possibly be at something, without being a fucking nutjob.” Only golf would consistently break him, so he quit. “I didn’t like myself on the golf course. That used to piss me off so much, it’s the only time I used to get petty. Sometimes I’d get home and think, ‘Oh my God, you behaved like a prick today.’” He gets shy in crowds, conscious that everyone recognises him and worried about not remembering people. I point out that this is universal, that he might be reaching for hardship.

“I sometimes wonder why I’ve been so lucky in life,” he said, and you can tell he really does. “I always wonder whether I’m being played by someone with a Playstation game on some other planet who’s actually quite good, and I’ve got the best player playing.”

We are speaking 10 years to the day since Lineker presented Match of the Day in Leicester City-branded underpants, the peak of “BBC Gary”, but also the end of something, a shift from national treasure to national talking point. The past decade has redefined him as, for better or worse, perhaps the British left’s most significant non-political political figure, led by his vocal opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza. In late July, he appeared on a podcast hosted by two Uk-based Palestinians and was told he is loved in Gaza for his support. “It felt quite poignant, because speaking out has become very difficult. It has cost people their jobs, I can speak from personal experience on that.”

In 2025, Lineker reposted an Instagram video about Zionism that featured a rat illustration, a widely recognised antisemitic trope. He later deleted the post and apologised, explaining he did not see the illustration. While he was due to leave Match of the Day at the end of the 2024-25 season, it meant he dropped out of planned coverage of the World Cup and FA Cup.

Around the Brexit vote he supported the Remain campaign, his first public political cause having then spent 20 years at the BBC. In October 2016, he tweeted that Britain’s treatment of refugees was “hideously racist and utterly heartless” and the Sun attempted to get him sacked from Match of the Day, and would keep trying for a decade for his perceived breaches of impartiality rules he was not technically bound by. By December 2016, Vice anointed him “the British Left’s Loudest Voice”, but after the 2017 election he branded himself “politically homeless”, writing: “Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?”

Adecade on, he has shifted further from the comfort of the middle ground. “For a lot of people, empathy goes as you get older, and you turn perhaps more to the far right. I’ve been the opposite.” That said, some of the BBC impartiality impulses linger on – he’s very deliberate with his language, diligently caveating and balancing, still finding the limits of uncaged life, but he likes it. “I don’t need to tread on eggshells all the time,” he says. “I’m now entitled to an opinion. Generally, life’s slightly more relaxed. I haven’t missed the BBC. I’ve got lots of respect for it, but it’s lost its way. They talk about impartiality, but at the top they’re definitely partial. We need to look beyond political parties deciding who’s on the board.”

During the World Cup, he invited New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani on his podcast, and said meeting him was “a thrill,” calling him “fantastic, amazingly charismatic, incredibly intelligent and articulate”. “He’s already made a bit of difference in New York and almost proving that lefty policies can work,” he said. “It’s early days, obviously, but the far right will always say, ‘Oh, we can’t have these leftist things, it’s been proved [not to work]… We’ve never really tried proper leftist policies [in the UK]!”

Lineker doesn’t know who he’ll vote for, but was interviewed by Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, late last year, and interviewed Andy Burnham shortly after he became prime minister. “Polanski made an impact in a similar way to Mamdani. I tend to find myself agreeing with a lot of [the Green Party’s] policies, particularly on the environment,” he said. “Here we are living another day in this heat and our government is talking about drilling for oil in the North Sea. For what? There’s not even any real benefit. Maybe it’s lobbying again from the fossil fuel merchants that put us in this mess. I just wonder how politicians who we vote to try and make a difference are not seeing this, or if they are seeing it, they’re allowing themselves to be lobbied.”

Alongside Richard Curtis and Brian Eno, Lineker was one of 120 UK millionaires to sign a letter last month asking to “tax us,” saying: “We know that wealth and power has been concentrated in a small group for too long, at the cost of our country, its people, our democracy and our environment.” The campaign, Patriotic Millionaires UK (led by, among others, Gary “Garys Economics” Stevenson), proposes a 2% tax on wealth over £10m and matching both capital gains and income-tax rates. Lineker wouldn’t have chosen the name – “Patriotism is a little like tribalism, I don’t like either particularly” – but is all-in on the idea.

The standard retort has been that if he wants to pay more tax so badly, HMRC accepts direct bank transfers. “Maybe I do,” he says to this criticism. “I would never admit it if I did. But it makes absolutely zero difference if it’s just you. What we’re actually demanding is not just those that wish to do it, but everybody that is able to do it should contribute to society to a degree. People talk about [multi-millionaires] fleeing the country. Will they really, for a tiny fraction of their super wealth?”

He’s increasingly obsessed by AI, too, to the point of conspiracy. “The amount of water [data centres] use and the energy levels at a time when we should be doing the exact opposite, and for what? For putting people out of work?” he says. “I think these billionaire tech oligarchs think AI will give eternal life for the super rich,” he adds, before musing that “the young people might need a global revolution”. He suggests I lead it, a kind offer that I’m still considering, but Greta Thunberg is his first choice. “She’d get a lot of people behind it. Obviously I don’t think that will happen, but it’s the way forward.”

Lineker’s third act is only just beginning, the daybreak of his twilight. There are more podcasts to come, reports about branching out into a cooking show, likely more grandchildren, a return to Saturday-night screens. Despite everything, he remains optimistic, about England, the world, humanity. “I still think we can do the right things,” he pauses. “We have the power to do that.” And then the PR wolves are at the door, and Britain’s unlikeliest revolutionary is whisked away.