Goalhanger: the evolution of a podcast powerhouse

“When classic BBC2 satire The Day Today conjured up Question Time: Live from Wembley Stadium, with Peter Sissons trying to keep order with a panel of politicians cheered on by hordes of screaming fans, it was an absurdist sight gag.

Thirty years on, 13,000 people crammed into the O2 to see Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart discuss the Tory leadership race for their podcast, The Rest Is Politics. 

The podcast’s short tour, for which 31,000 tickets were sold at upwards of £50 a head, culminated with Campbell leading a rousing rendition of Auld Lang Syne on the bagpipes to fans wearing T-shirts emblazoned with their favourite of the two hosts. Political debate, it appears, has finally become the new rock and roll.

Launched in May 2022 by Goalhanger, The Rest Is Politics (TRIP) now gets 9 million downloads a month (second in the Goalhanger stable only to The Rest Is History with 11 million), with its YouTube stream watched by 3.8 million.

For the US elections, it’s a case of ‘Podcasters Assemble’ as the pair join forces with an elite band of Goalhanger talent - Anthony Scaramucci (The Rest Is Politics US), Dominic Sandbrook (The Rest Is History) and Marina Hyde (The Rest Is Entertainment) – for a US election night special on 5 November, streamed live on YouTube from Spotify’s Manhattan office.

Having “lent” Campbell and Stewart – and their audience – to Channel 4’s UK election night show, Goalhanger this time wants to keep the rewards to itself. After all, US elections are a hugely different beast, and the team may repeatedly be called on to offer updates, potentially with a series of daily podcasts.

“The beauty of podcasting is its flexibility,” says Goalhanger chief executive Tony Pastor. “The night Joe Biden dropped out, we had a four-way live stream from our UK and US politics hosts before any of the mainstream news organisations got their pieces ready.”

With election graphics from Manchester-based Dizplai, Pastor hopes to offer viewers “a nice combination of a traditional TV show with our podcast model of warmth, insider insight and engagement with our audience”.

Brand and talent

Goalhanger didn’t set out to be a podcast specialist. Set up in 2014 by Pastor and Gary Lineker, Goalhanger has made a string of documentaries for the BBC, ITV and History, featuring the likes of Anthony Joshua, Kelly Holmes and Wayne Rooney, as well as the BBC’s weekly Premiere League Show. Its pivot to podcasts began in earnest during lockdown, of which more later.

Driven by canny host pairings – and a little of Lineker’s star wattage – Goalhanger’s shows are in the UK podcast superleague, with 300 million downloads across its portfolio so far this year. The Rest Is… format, which accounts for six of its shows (see box, below), is built around the talents’ personalities and authority, underpinned by a rigorous production operation.

“When you want presenters to lead the content, the risk is that you end up with quite unfocused conversations that can go in all different directions,” says managing director Jack Davenport. “We want an element of that, but we focus a lot of our production on putting a structure in place to let them talk about what they’re interested in, while making it accessible.”

From a staff of 12 last year, Goalhanger now employs 40 people – and a particularly busy edition of TRIP can employ up to 14 of them.

Running orders are shaped after a week of chat in each show’s WhatsApp group, with hosts mining their contact books for insiders who can share views on hot-button topics or answer listeners’ questions.

Goalhanger’s roots might be traditional – Pastor is a former ITV head of sport and Davenport a former BBC Radio 5 Live producer – but its staff come increasingly from within the podcast sphere. “Some we hire for their specialisms in sales or video editing, but the medium is mature enough now to have a lot of people wanting to specialise as podcast producers,” says Pastor.

Among its recent appointments is Nicole Logan, a former head of development at audio producer Reduced Listening, who will find new talent and develop ideas to pilot stage. All six of The Rest Is… formats are filmed for YouTube, and they’re increasingly described as ‘shows’ rather than podcasts – during the Euros, video views of The Rest Is Football (TRIF) outstripped audio downloads for the first time.

“The skills developed on our documentaries are invaluable now as we make compelling visual products as well as audio,” says Davenport. “So we have a mixture of TV and radio expertise, and we believe in bringing through younger producers with a passion for the medium. We can teach a lot of the technical stuff.”

“The formula is two people having great conversation about things they’re absolutely passionate about”
Tony Pastor

Audio technology improvements and the Covid lockdown’s impact on audience habits both played a part in Goalhanger’s evolution. Pastor, a history buff, spotted a gap in the market for history podcasts, and when Goalhanger approached James Holland, the historian suggested working with comedian Al Murray. With the resulting debut podcast, We Have Ways Of Making You Talk, a blueprint was born.

Pastor defines the formula as “two people having great conversations about things they’re absolutely passionate about”.

Holland and Murray did just that, picking up 2,000 subscribers in 2020 with a daily show recorded remotely from each of their homes, providing new revenue streams for Goalhanger at a time when traditional TV production had largely shut down. (By the time TRIP launched, Rory Stewart could host from a Kenyan roadside café with a pencil case of kit, a laptop and a wi-fi signal.)

It’s both a highly successful formula and one that relies heavily on the alchemy of the presenters. One podcast sector expert notes the relative lack of format points in the The Rest Is… stable and ponders what would happen in the event that a host chose to leave.

Goalhanger owns The Rest Is… branding and would be in a position to replace its stars if that did happen, but for now, it is the pairings, collaboration and back and forth between its talent that is driving it success.

A commissioning democracy

With their cluster of podcasts and the large, engaged communities that have sprung up around them, Pastor and Davenport have turned their backs on the traditional TV model.

“Podcasting has effectively democratised the commissioning system in British media,” says Pastor. “We no longer have to get an hour with a commissioner to persuade them of the merits of our idea and to give us the money to produce it, then try to make it within their budget. And then, somehow, try to keep a 10% production fee margin.”

He also flags TV’s tendency to pigeonhole both people and companies. “As somebody with a sports production background, it’s difficult to persuade a broadcaster that you want to make a history or politics show. We’re able to circumvent that model, which is broken in the UK for a variety of structural reasons. We go directly to the audience.”

Davenport adds: “Everything we’ve done has felt like a natural next step: a specific bit of history, then wider history, then politics with some appeal to that [politically engaged] audience but bringing in new listeners too. That’s pretty much how we built the business.”

Their priorities have shifted in the past year: after launching four podcasts in 2023, culminating in November with The Rest Is Entertainment (TRIE), TRIP US is their sole new show of 2024. Goalhanger keeps its financial performance close to its chest (and files microcompany accounts at Companies House), but Davenport says it has managed to double revenues each year.

Advertising still accounts for the biggest share – don’t expect TRIE’s Richard Osman and Marina Hyde to stop extolling the benefits of NordVPN any time soon – but recent months have been about diversifying, with more live events and subscription packages.

TRIE is the latest to offer a choice of premium tiers, with the highest (£7.99 per month) tempting subscribers with bonus episodes in which the hosts take on pet subjects (“think Marina Hyde on Steven Seagal”, says Pastor), plus its first live show at the Albert Hall in December.

“Not everybody wants ads and we know that early access and extra content is really popular,” says Pastor. “Richard and Marina want to do deep dives – they’ll probably be a bit quirky – and we needed a place to put those. The super-fan willing to pay extra is exactly the audience for it.”

Editorial integrity

Are the ads tricky territory for TRIE? Sky supports the show, for example, which is complicated by Hyde’s involvement with HBO superhero movie satire The Franchise, airing in the UK on Sky Comedy, while Osman’s wife Ingrid Oliver appears in the satellite giant’s dark drama Sweetpea.

Pastor says sponsors hold no sway in its editorial position, nor those of the hosts who voice the ads. “We write our own [advertising] scripts. If Richard and Marina say they’ve watched a show on Sky, they have – and they do tell you what they think.” He also highlights that TRIF is “pretty much the only football show that doesn’t do gambling ads”.

Sometimes things fall into place more organically. “Guinness is sponsor of TRIF for the football season, and Alan Shearer drinks nothing else,” Pastor says. “That’s a useful starting position: when it was first mooted, Guinness looked at his Instagram and saw 20 photos of him in various parts of the world drinking their brand.”

Next up is merchandising. “We must be the largest podcast company that doesn’t sell its own T-shirts and mugs,” laughs Pastor. Goalhanger did earn around £14,000 from merchandise during a trial run on the TRIP tour, but “we haven’t scratched the surface as we don’t have the headspace to work on it yet,” says Davenport.

“We’re trying to get our heads around what it looks like to make content specifically with a US audience in mind”
Jack Davenport

Then there’s the US. Though Goalhanger’s first American podcast is primarily for a UK audience, the US accounts for a fifth of its listeners. The US election special could boost its profile further and open doors to a market that, at £2bn, dwarfs the UK’s £70m sector.

“We grew an American audience almost by accident because of history,” says Davenport. “Between We Have Ways Of Making You Talk, The Rest Is History and Empire, a quarter of listeners are in the US. While we probably won’t launch any more UK history podcasts, our next couple of releases will be in the US – not TRIH US, but something in that sphere. We’re trying to get our heads around what it looks like to make content specifically with a US audience in mind.”

What about back home? Flicking through an imaginary newspaper supplement past the politics, money, entertainment and sport sections, should we expect The Rest Is Food? Gardening? Cars?

Beyond Davenport’s ambition to reach “new audiences we don’t speak to currently”, he admits they’ve been “really encouraged” by TRIE and “would love to do more in entertainment”. Also worth noting is the 50/50 gender balance in the audience for that show, the fourth consecutive launch with a male/ female presenter pairing. “There’s a gap generally in the UK for podcasts aimed more at women,” he notes.

At a boom time for podcasts, are there any subjects or genres where the market feels saturated? A pause, before Davenport suggests – to laughs from Pastor – “Politics podcasts with former politicians?”