I’m a sucker for football podcasts. There are two, both about Spurs, which I listen to religiously (The View From The Lane and The Spurs Show, as well as another three I dip in and out of). I’ve now added a third – Henry Winter and Christian Purslow’s fascinating The Football Boardroom, about the business side of the sport. Highly recommended.
But I’ve never listened to the biggest of them all – The Rest Is Football, from the same stable as the wonderful The Rest Is History and the very not wonderful The Rest Is Politics. There’s a straightforward reason for that: Gary Lineker.
All three are produced by Lineker’s Goalhanger but while there is no sign of the striker-turned-presenter on the latter two, he is front and centre of The Rest Is Football. And for reasons which JC readers will well understand, I’d rather watch Arsenal celebrate ten successive Premier League titles than spend a minute listening to the odious Lineker on anything.
Lineker has now taken the podcast, which has been going since August 2023, and turned it into a daily Netflix programme for the World Cup. You can image how my blood ran cold when the editor asked me to watch the first episode this morning and write about my reaction. The things I do for JC readers, eh?
The most galling thing when Lineker presented Match of the Day was that we were forced by law to pay him to appear on our screens. Now there is a choice. No one is forced to pay for Netflix.
I’ll admit immediately that my reaction to the programme this morning was tainted by the fact that I simply can’t bear to watch Lineker. The mere sight of him enrages me. This is a man who, last summer, liked an Instagram post by a man who led a death chant against Jews. This is a man who last year posted a video by a group called Palestine Lobby, entitled "Zionism explained in two minutes", which included an image of a rat – a long-standing antisemitic comparison. This is a man who compared the last government’s asylum policy to the Nazis.
This is a man who last April when commenting on the October 7 2023 massacre argued that “the full context starts way before October 7th”. This is a man who demanded that Israel be expelled from all international sporting and cultural bodies, “until it ends its grave violations of international law… particularly its apartheid rule and the crime of genocide it is perpetuating in Gaza” – but who has made no similar demand of Iran, China, Russia or any other nation on earth.
This is a man who attacked the description of the hate marches as hate marches. This is a man who posted after the death in Nablus of Ahmed Daraghmeh, who was killed in a clash with Israeli soldiers, “How awful”, reposting a tweet accusing the IDF of taking Daragmeh’s life “treacherously". In reality, Daraghmeh died during an attack on Jews who had been visiting the site of Joseph’s tomb and was then mourned by Hamas as a mujahid – a fighter or warrior.
This is a man who endorsed a video conversation on the theme of “Israel is committing genocide” between Owen Jones and Raz Segal, the latter whose response to the October 7 massacre was to write a piece for the Guardian telling its readers that “Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust”. “Worth 13 minutes of anyone’s time”, wrote Lineker under the video.
This is a man who between 2009 and 2013 was paid £1.6 million by Al Jazeera, an organisation used by Hamas as a mouthpiece, for fronting its Champions League coverage. And this is a man who in 2022 launched the BBC’s World Cup coverage with criticism of the host nation Qatar's record on human rights and migrant workers – the same Qatar which had, through Al Jazeera, paid him £1.6 million.
This is, in other words, a man whose presence I cannot bear.
The good news is that, having forced myself to watch the first Netflix show, I realised I am missing nothing. Lineker is certainly an excellent presenter – he was well-trained by the BBC, whose nose he then rubbed in excrement when he decided to use his fame to post lies about Israel. But The Rest Is Football is an hour of inane chit-chat and “banter”, and it’s beyond me why anyone would devote an hour of their life every day to watching it, even if they didn’t wretch at the sight of Lineker.
Podcasts are one thing; you can have them on in the background while you go about your business. But TV forces you to stop and watch. Why would anyone want to watch The Rest Is Football? There are any number of compelling podcasts, and a whole load more for the World Cup. And they all have one clear advantage: no Gary Lineker.
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