Politixia
Tony Reali has his next act.
More than a year after Around the Horn ended its run on ESPN, the longtime host is debuting REAL DEAL with Tony Reali on Tuesday, July 14, on iHeartPodcasts, distributed by his own Real Ones Media, with new episodes releasing every Tuesday. Each week, Reali and a rotating cast of guests will dig into a single iconic sports moment and explore why it still resonates.
Rather than the point-scoring debate format that defined Around the Horn for two decades, each episode centers on a single sports moment — a play, a clip, a photo, a legend — and excavates the story, the emotion, and the people behind it. Guests will range from athletes and broadcasters to comedians, superfans, and anyone with the most compelling connection to the moment being examined — famous or otherwise.
“I’m excited. Then again, I was born excited,” Reali said in a statement. “After 25 years in television, I’m thrilled to be partnering with iHeart to launch REAL DEAL. It’s more Tony, it’s still Tony, and it’s a new Tony, all at once. I can’t wait for everyone to see what we’ve been building.”
The show is the biggest platform Reali has landed since Around the Horn was unceremoniously canceled by ESPN after more than two decades on the air. Awful Announcing wrote at the time that Reali got a raw deal, that after nearly 7,000 episodes on Around the Horn and as “stat boy” on Pardon the Interruption, the network callously showed the door to one of the most beloved and universally respected personalities it had ever produced.
The night of the final episode, Reali launched his own YouTube channel and hosted a two-hour livestream featuring more than a dozen former panelists, before spending the better part of a year grinding to build out what came next.
That process played out publicly in fits and starts. Reali spent a week in Miami as a positivity correspondent on The Dan Le Batard Show in June 2025, launched The Real Ones — his own digital media company — in September, and by November was hosting Around the Room on Playback, a scrappy digital reimagining of Around the Horn with sports content creators that drew fewer than 600 viewers but laid bare just how much Reali had to offer as an independent content creator himself.
Now, those experiments have culminated in REAL DEAL, his first major long-form podcast venture, which will soon be available on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.
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