A historian, a satirist and the founder of The Receipts Podcast are among the inaugural cohort for Goalhanger‘s The Accelerator, a new creator-led initiative exclusively unveiled by The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year.
Goalhanger, which says it is the U.K.’s fastest-growing private company, co-founded by former England soccer star Gary Lineker and responsible for The Rest Is podcast franchise, has launched a three-month creative business incubator in collaboration with social media-savvy personalities.
Each of them will receive up to £10,000 ($13,400) in content investment to elevate their production standards and experiment with short-form storytelling across entertainment, lifestyle, sport, politics, science & tech, and finance.
The 2026 cohort includes Cody Dahler, a satirist and writer with over 1.5 million followers on Instagram, who is developing The Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb Search Engine, a new format designed to move beyond traditional explainers through interviews, location shoots and “deeper comic investigation.”
Sophia Smith Galer, a journalist and author with over half a million TikTok followers, who will use The Accelerator to develop English: An Alternative History, a five-part short-form series exploring the story of the English language before the empire. “I’m ecstatic to win a spot on [Goalhanger’s] Accelerator,” said Galer. “It’s going to give me the space and resourcing to make my biggest social media series yet. The one thing lots of creators say is that we lack infrastructure and community, and to see Goalhanger make an investment in us feels like the beginning of something really important.”
