But squint through all the dazzle, and you\u2019ll notice one thing missing: a sports star. While last year\u2019s lineup had two \u2013 Olympic diver Tom Daley<\/a> and England rugby player Joe Marler<\/a> \u2013 nobody due in the Scottish Highlands this time comes from that sector. Unless King Kenny \u2013 a YouTuber and participant in the kind of boxing where your opponent is also a YouTuber \u2013 counts.<\/p>\n If last autumn\u2019s Celebrity Traitors taught us anything, it\u2019s 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<\/a>. Not Alan Carr<\/a>, who won despite being the most obviously guilty Traitor the format has yet chosen. Not Stephen Fry<\/a>, whose relentless avuncularity kept him safe for weeks. No, it was Marler \u2013 ousted in the final by two people, Nick Mohammed<\/a> and David Olusoga, who formed, as one Independent critic put it, \u201ca grave alliance in mutual ignorance\u201d \u2013 who was the show\u2019s indisputable breakout star. The gruff, no-nonsense Marler was prepared to puncture the obsequiousness, to cut through the luvvie back-slapping. He didn\u2019t care about getting a spot on Jonathan Ross<\/a>\u2019s sofa. On the final steam train challenge, as Carr dithered, Marler\u2019s patience ran out. \u201cWe haven\u2019t got time for your bum bag,\u201d he told him. He was hilarious and real.<\/p>\n The thing is, the skulduggery that makes The Traitors so compulsive requires a certain Machiavellian willingness to look someone in the eye and lie \u2013 which is considerably harder when you\u2019ve 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 \u2013 years of saying nothing while appearing to say everything; of deflecting, stonewalling and maintaining a straight face under sustained interrogation. <\/p>\n Which sports stars, then, would have been perfect? Imagine if they\u2019d recruited Michael Owen<\/a>. This is a person of such preternatural blankness that he once confessed he cannot watch films because he finds them implausible. \u201cPeople shooting each other, rolling over with bullets just missing them, jumping off of trains,\u201d he explained. \u201cHow can anyone believe that?\u201d <\/p>\n As a pundit, the former Ballon d\u2019Or winner has furnished us with gems, including \u201cfootballers these days often have to use their feet\u201d. Put him in that castle and nobody would have the faintest idea what he was thinking. Micah Richards<\/a> \u2013 irrepressible, warm, constitutionally incapable of keeping a straight face \u2013 would have made the round table uproariously unpredictable. <\/p>\n Or what about Gary Neville<\/a>? The former Manchester United captain, now Sky Sports\u2019 most trenchant pundit, once incredulously pointed to the rise of lattes in a debate about the globalisation of football. \u201cTwenty years ago,\u201d he opined, \u201cyou put milk in your coffee, it was a milky coffee; it wasn\u2019t a latte or a Frappuccino\u201d. 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<\/a> 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 \u2013 someone so ferociously driven that she wouldn\u2019t let anyone stand in her way, no matter how many indelible lines they\u2019ve spouted, or Brits they\u2019ve won.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 and right now, only one world has entered the fray.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-568930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/562990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/celeb-traitors-2.jpeg\")
The new Celebrity Traitors cast includes: (clockwise from top left) Richard E Grant, Joe Lycett, Bella Ramsey, Maya Jama, Miranda Hart, Michael Sheen, James Acaster, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and James Blunt (The Independent\/Getty\/BBC)<\/p>\n