Jamie Vardy wants a piece of Gary Lineker’s football content pie

Alan TyersMon, September 7, 2026 at 5:30 AM UTC

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Mike Dean told Jamie Vardy, the former Leicester striker, that the in-game challenges were ‘just me joking about’ - X

A pair of unlikely media movers-and-shakers this week: me-me-me Mike Dean, the former referee, who thrust himself into the spotlight when he appeared on a podcast hosted by Jamie Vardy, the diamond-in-the-rough goal machine now even more widely known as Rebekah’s fella.

Dean told the audience of Jamie Vardy’s Having A Party that he used to muck about during matches to see, for instance, how long he could go without blowing his whistle.

Ref Support, a charity that represents the interests of officials, said that Dean was “desperate to be viewed as one of the boys” and had offered a “gold-plated tool” to those who hurl abuse at the men in black.

Mike certainly made a gold-plated tool of himself but the initial audience for his comments would have been as limited as Jamie’s hosting skills. The episode, at the time of writing, had 29,000 views on YouTube. Vardy’s previous dispatch, ‘Ngolo Kante Wanted To RUN To Leicester Training’ (capitalisation: model’s own) had almost exactly the same: 28,000. The podcast sits at a modest No 20 on Apple’s sports podcast charts. The point being: not many people are actually sitting down to consume/endure the full programme but the potential reach of a news story filleted from it is broad.

Very much the modern way. The Telegraph’s post on X about Dean’s oddball self-sabotage, for example, has been viewed 993,000 times. The story was given prominent coverage across most newspapers, and Dean was on Sky Sports’s Soccer Saturday to talk about it.

Dean has a David Brent vibe about him

With just 28,000 viewers, the YouTube advertising revenue would be pocket change, at best, for an active footballer, but Jamie and his handlers have obviously eyed up the potential if they can increase the podcast audience (and get it working in concert with other parts of the Vardy Media Empire, such as the unwatchable ITV fly-on-the-wall series The Vardys, or even his adventures at new club Burnley).

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In one of those increasingly common “I cannot believe I am typing this” sports-media moments, Jamie’s channel had acquired the UK rights to the opening match of the Bundesliga season, meaning that people who wanted to could visit YouTube on the Friday night of the recent bank holiday for a “watchalong party” of Bayern Munich 5 Stuttgart 1. Do not forget, Samaritans is available 24 hours a day.

The Vardy dream, perhaps, might be to become a rival to another former Leicester striker: Gary Lineker, whose Goalhanger was recently named by the Sunday Times as Britain’s fastest-growing private company, with three-year annual growth of 321.25 per cent. It is striking how quickly the disruptors become established, arguably even become the establishment.

Watching (for these are essentially TV shows, not radio formats) Lineker’s Netflix podcast The Rest Is Football recently, I am struck that it really is very similar to Match of the Day as was: Alan Shearer buoyant about Newcastle, Micah Richards teased about a preposterous beret. Shearer: “He looks like Frank Spencer.” One for the kids there. The only remotely avant-garde element is that it is a recap of football matches where you cannot watch any football highlights.

I like Micah but if he is not on Sky, he is on the BBC or on the Lineker thing, and there is a similar overexposure to the likes of Roy Keane and Gary Neville. The concentration of clout in the hands of half-a-dozen or so of the same old faces has, ironically Brian, made this potentially cosmopolitan broadcast format as much of a jobs-for-the-boys cosy club as the BBC of old.

Gary Lineker has taken his “The Rest Is Football” show with Alan Shearer and Micah Richards on stage - Getty Images/James Klug

The canny operators know that a skilfully repackaged sound bite on social media reaches an exponentially greater number of people than were originally watching (unluckily for Mike Dean). But this is now leading to the queasy realisation that the machine has become self-aware: on Sunday, Jamie Carragher and Ian Wright were on Sky Sports speculating whether this “big Super Sunday” would be the day “we hear the first ‘Oooo’ of the season from Gary Neville”. Frank Spencer should sue for trademark infringement.

“All that once was directly lived has become mere representation,” Guy Debord – a top, top Situationist philosopher – wrote in The Society Of The Spectacle. We now live in a media era where Gary Neville is not going “oooo” at something in a football match, he’s preparing to go “oooo” at something in a football match because people expect Gary Neville to go “oooo” at something in a football match and that expectation can be turned into coins. Enough already. I don’t think we need to add Jamie Vardy into that as well.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”