Never has reality TV boasted a starrier lineup than this year’s Celebrity Traitors. The inaugural star cast from 2025 was already something special – from Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross to Celia Imrie and Charlotte Church – but the latest edition makes it look measly. There are the thesps (Richard E Grant, Michael Sheen, Bella Ramsey, Myha’la); the comedians (Miranda Hart, Romesh Ranganathan, James Acaster, Joe Lycett); the pop stars (Leigh-Anne Pinnock, James Blunt); and the presenters (Maya Jama, Amol Rajan, Hannah Fry). Twenty-one names, all genuine coups.
But squint through all the dazzle, and you’ll notice one thing missing: a sports star. While last year’s lineup had two – Olympic diver Tom Daley and England rugby player Joe Marler – nobody due in the Scottish Highlands this time comes from that sector. Unless King Kenny – a YouTuber and participant in the kind of boxing where your opponent is also a YouTuber – counts.
If last autumn’s Celebrity Traitors taught us anything, it’s that the show is at its best when someone walks in from an alien orbit and cares not one jot about the cultural cachet. That person was Joe Marler. Not Alan Carr, who won despite being the most obviously guilty Traitor the format has yet chosen. Not Stephen Fry, whose relentless avuncularity kept him safe for weeks. No, it was Marler – ousted in the final by two people, Nick Mohammed and David Olusoga, who formed, as one Independent critic put it, “a grave alliance in mutual ignorance” – who was the show’s indisputable breakout star. The gruff, no-nonsense Marler was prepared to puncture the obsequiousness, to cut through the luvvie back-slapping. He didn’t care about getting a spot on Jonathan Ross’s sofa. On the final steam train challenge, as Carr dithered, Marler’s patience ran out. “We haven’t got time for your bum bag,” he told him. He was hilarious and real.
The thing is, the skulduggery that makes The Traitors so compulsive requires a certain Machiavellian willingness to look someone in the eye and lie – which is considerably harder when you’ve been on their podcast or starred alongside them. A footballer, by contrast, is trained for exactly this. There is no better preparation for the round table than a post-match press conference – years of saying nothing while appearing to say everything; of deflecting, stonewalling and maintaining a straight face under sustained interrogation.
Which sports stars, then, would have been perfect? Imagine if they’d recruited Michael Owen. This is a person of such preternatural blankness that he once confessed he cannot watch films because he finds them implausible. “People shooting each other, rolling over with bullets just missing them, jumping off of trains,” he explained. “How can anyone believe that?”
As a pundit, the former Ballon d’Or winner has furnished us with gems, including “footballers these days often have to use their feet”. Put him in that castle and nobody would have the faintest idea what he was thinking. Micah Richards – irrepressible, warm, constitutionally incapable of keeping a straight face – would have made the round table uproariously unpredictable.
Or what about Gary Neville? The former Manchester United captain, now Sky Sports’ most trenchant pundit, once incredulously pointed to the rise of lattes in a debate about the globalisation of football. “Twenty years ago,” he opined, “you put milk in your coffee, it was a milky coffee; it wasn’t a latte or a Frappuccino”. That kind of Partridgism would have been gold; so, too, his tendency to squirm under pressure, as on Have I Got News For You, when Ian Hislop and Paul Merton grilled him about taking money (as a pundit for Qatari broadcaster beIN Sports) from the very state whose human rights record he’d previously decried. Fun, also, might have been an Olympian like Denise Lewis – someone so ferociously driven that she wouldn’t let anyone stand in her way, no matter how many indelible lines they’ve spouted, or Brits they’ve won.
The 2026 lineup will make for brilliant television, of that there is little doubt. But this is a show that crackles most when worlds collide – and right now, only one world has entered the fray.
