Gary Lineker’s The Rest Is Football dominates booming UK sport podcasts market

The Guardian told Press Gazette that Football Daily, a more regular version of their usual Football Weekly, saw a 77% increase in viewership relative to their pre-tournament average going into Euro 2024.

Football Weekly producer Joel Grove said the community element is key for podcasts: “Audience questions and emails are a fundamental part of Football Weekly. Audience questions are, nine times out of ten, better than anything Max [Rushden] and I can write. And if there’s a flurry of emails on a particular topic, we’ll use that to inform what the content of the show is. I think having that symbiotic relationship with the audience is different to other forms of media.”

The High Performance Podcast, hosted by former BT Sport and BBC presenter Jake Humphrey and Professor Damian Hughes, was ranked third in the UK on the Apple podcasts chart in the sport category at time of writing. It focuses on interviews with sportspeople and other successful individuals.

Humphrey said podcasts are popular partly because of the different kinds of conversations they produce.

He told Press Gazette that “the big difference between what I did previously, which was hosting big sports events, is that people would come to listen and watch those sports events, to be honest, regardless of the job that I did. Whereas, when it comes to something like High Performance, we are only going to have the millions of views that we get every year if the quality is really high.”

High Performance claims 10 million listens per quarter

High Performance claims more than 10 million listens across all platforms per quarter and has doubled year on year.

Humphrey said: “I think that our show is also an antithesis to the modern discourse which is about anger and strong opinions… I think that what we’re there to do is not really to have an opinion, we’re just there to open someone up and have an honest conversation about who they actually are.”

Humphrey said when he was exploring the idea of High Performance he “spent quite a long time meeting various people in television, but the truth is that people didn’t really see the vision.

“Television commissions are hard things to get away. I also started thinking about the fact that I love entrepreneurship and I love controlling what I’m doing and controlling my own destiny.

“What I didn’t really want was some TV commissioner saying ‘you have to change this, you have to change that’, because the single most important thing for High Performance, and I think what makes successful podcasts successful, is that the focus is only on the audience.”

Humphrey said the podcast is a commercial success and he sees a bright future as long as it continues to follow its audience:

“Our job is to go where the audience are. Some people want to watch on an app where they get loads of additional information that we’ve created. Some people want to listen to it in the car on their way to work. Some people want to sit and watch it in a beautifully-lit studio, with the most expensive TV cameras you can buy, on their big 4K TV; we give you an option for that as well. Some people just want clips on social media; we’re all over Tiktok and Instagram. Our job is to produce an amazing product, but then to go and find the audience to enjoy that amazing product.”

Goalhanger’s Football Cliches digests the latest events through the lens of familiar platitudes in the game and has been running since 2020

Presenter Adam Hurrey, who is also a journalist for The Athletic, said: “You want a podcast to be made by people who sound happy and passionate to be there, and not just doing it to promote something else.”

The Cycling Podcast has been going for more than a decade.

Presenter Lionel Birnie said: “By the end of 2012, recognising the direction of travel for print media (redundancies, title closures, squeezed budgets, fewer opportunities for freelancers) we could see the writing on the wall.

“The podcasting wave was gathering pace and we got started at the right time to attract a big enough audience to make it worth our while but at a time when we could learn the medium without intense scrutiny.”

Initial sponsorship from electronics company Sharp turned into an increased commitment after a highly successful 2013 Tour de France, and the podcast then transformed into a weekly show. In the 11 years since starting, The Cycling Podcast team have produced around 1,500 episodes and achieved 100 million downloads, hitting a million downloads a month over the course of a typical Tour de France.

Advertising and sponsorship are the main drivers of revenue for podcasts, though some – like High Performance – also sell subscriptions which offer bonus episodes and ad-free content.

Many successful podcasts have also expanded into live events.

Robert Abel, head of audio business and strategy at The Guardian, said: “When you bring all of the things together – the book, the merchandise, the tour, the podcast – they mutually amplify each other, but it’s also a brand exercise as well… everyone goes to the show, has a great night, and talks to their friends about the podcast.”