Whatever your opinion on Gary Lineker – and he has done his best, over the years, to ensure that most of us have one – there is no question that his impending departure from the BBC represents a broadcasting landmark.
For Lineker will leave Match of the Day at the end of its 60th anniversary while he himself has clocked up 25 years as its presenter. That makes him, by some margin, the longest-serving presenter of one of television’s longest-running shows.
The late Jimmy Hill, for example, did 15 years. Des Lynam stayed for 11. Yet Lineker has achieved a broadcasting silver jubilee, ranking him alongside, say, Jeremy Paxman at Newsnight or Magnus Magnusson with Mastermind.
Now, he moves on, though not, in the time-honoured parlance to ‘spend more time with his family’. The resolutely single presenter has given several interviews saying that, after two marriages and four children, he is very happy living on his own. Rather, he has more time to pursue his lucrative outside interests which make that £1.35 million-a year BBC deal look like pocket money. Nor will he be off the BBC books anyway, since his The Rest Is Football podcast will be moving to the BBC Sounds platform in what ought to be another lucrative deal.
Half the fun of watching a Lineker foray into some great debate was seeing how far he would goad the BBC management into reprimanding him before actually reprimanding him
For the rest of us, of course, the great thing is that Gary Lineker can now tell us what he really thinks.
After all these years of biting his lip, of holding back out of respect for those sacred BBC principles of political impartiality, we are finally going to find out where the Sage of Leicester really stands on the big issues. Will the real Gary please stand up?
Except, of course, we don’t need to wait. Lineker unleashed will be about as predictable as, say Chelsea v the Chelsea Pensioners.
Half the fun of watching a Lineker foray into some great debate was seeing how far he would goad the BBC management into reprimanding him before actually reprimanding him. ‘Do I really need the s***?’ he reflected to one interviewer. ‘Although I suppose I quite enjoy finding out where the line is.’ That was ten years ago and he has been straining that line ever since, through multiple close-shaves and a lot of mutual exasperation.
On all the bog-standard, centre-Left trigger issues – be it Brexit or Donald Trump or immigration or the general uselessness of the Tories – we would expect a little chin-scratching, virtue-signalling homily which stopped just short of crossing that line.
It might occasionally be of the tee-hee-hee variety – ‘Never trust a cake. Ambushing b*****ds,’ he wrote after a Tory MP claimed that former PM Boris Johnson had been ‘ambushed by a cake’ during the 2022 Partygate inquiry. More often, it would be prim and preachy, as might be expected of one who recently announced that he felt compelled to step into the online pulpit ‘so I can look at myself in the mirror at night’.
‘History will look back very favourably on these people,’ he declared solemnly in 2022, giving the Lineker blessing to the Just Stop Oil mob who had invaded the track during the British Grand Prix. This prompted fellow TV-pundit, ex-racing driver Martin Brundle, to shoot back: ‘Gary please don’t encourage this reckless behaviour.’
To question the sagacity of the Righteous One was not without risk, however. In 2018, in the depths of the Brexit schism in Westminster, Lineker waded into the campaign for a second referendum, even appearing on stage at a rally outside Parliament. This did not sit well with some colleagues.
‘Gary. You are the face of BBC Sport,’ tweeted the BBC’s cricket correspondent, Jonathan Agnew. ‘Please observe BBC editorial guidelines and keep your political views, whatever they are and whatever the subject, to yourself. I’d be sacked if I followed your example. Thanks.’
Lineker walking his dog near his home in London today
Lineker was not having that, telling Agnew: ‘I’ll continue to tweet what I like and if folk disagree with me then so be it.’ He added archly that Agnew would not have said anything ‘if you agreed with me’, thus unleashing the full fury of the Remainiacs against Agnew. No matter that ‘Aggers’ had actually voted to Remain (as he later felt compelled to reveal). He simply wanted his colleague to play by the same rules as everyone else.
What continues to irk many within the BBC, some of whom share Lineker’s world view and some of whom do not, is that in lecturing from his moral high ground, he was simply providing ammunition for the Corporation’s critics and the ‘Defund the BBC’ crowd. Lineker would retort (correctly) that the rules which applied to the ordinary worker bees in New Broadcasting House did not apply to him as he was not part of the news operation and not on the regular staff. This, though, was a detail lost on licence payers who would read, year after year, that Lineker was the highest-paid BBC ‘talent’, taking home upwards of £1.7 million for his Saturday night analysis of that day’s football action.
And then, having picked a fight, he would bristle and say that people only complained when they disagreed with him. That was not so. In many cases, they merely believed that he should not be having the fight in the first place.
Another BBC colleague received a similar roasting in 2022 after Lineker attacked Tory MPs for their policy on sewage treatment: ‘As a politician how could you ever, under any circumstances, bring yourself to vote for pumping sewage into our seas? Unfathomable!’ Few would argue with the underlying sentiment (I remember reporting that very week on an appalling influx of toxic filth into Windermere). However, this was an issue with a complex back story stretching back through both Labour and Tory administrations and it was hardly a moment for BBC presenters to start dictating government policy.
We often hear footballers described as ‘role models’. In which regard, there could be few better than Gary Winston Lineker
Neil Henderson, a senior BBC news editor, told Lineker as much. After the big cheese presenter huffily pointed out that such rules applied to those in ‘news and current affairs’, Henderson persisted: ‘The BBC lives or dies by its impartiality. If you can’t abide it, get off it.’
At which point, the BBC declared that guidelines had indeed been breached – by Henderson, of course. The lesser-known staffer was duly compelled to apologise for criticising a colleague on social media.
The nearest Lineker came to pressing the ejector button was last year’s assault on the government’s plans to send Channel-crossing asylum-seekers to Rwanda. Lineker accused the then Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, of ‘language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’. After the Prime Minister and senior ministers complained about Lineker’s own choice of language, the BBC announced that he would ‘step back’ from that weekend’s Match of the Day while the management examined its guidelines. His absence prompted an ‘I’m Spartacus’ moment as fellow presenters declared they would stay away in solidarity. Eventually, the BBC announced a fudge whereby presenters of ‘flagship’ shows like Lineker’s could not endorse or attack politicians or their parties while their programme was ongoing.
Of course, in the echo chambers of Twitter (or X as it became) and in the adoring upper echelons of London media land, Lineker was simply voicing perfectly honourable, mainstream thoughts. Time and again, centrist dads from Clerkenwell to the Cotswolds would raise a craft beer to this heroic head rising above the parapet, bravely mocking the cretinous provincials and racist deplorables who might think otherwise.
However, therein lay the problem. Whether Lineker wanted to align himself with Greta Thunberg or Nigel Farage, a significant chunk of the 27 million people paying the BBC licence fee expected him to do so privately as the quid pro quo for enjoying exalted public prominence and substantial remuneration as a sports pundit – from their pockets.
In interviews, Lineker would usually lament the beastliness of social media trolls. Indeed, back in 2013, he briefly abandoned Twitter altogether. To which many might simply retort that, if you have a thin skin and don’t like nutters, don’t venture into the madhouse. He would insist that he was not into politics. He was just being, y’know, kind.
Lineker is famous for being the highest goal-scorer for three top flight clubs, not to mention England’s top World Cup scorer of all time
Ultimately, the mask of caring, compassionate neutrality would slip on the issue of Gaza. It was not what Lineker said which upset many former allies. It was what he failed to say. Discussing the Israeli assault on Gaza earlier this year, Lineker said: ‘I can’t think of anything that I’ve seen worse in my lifetime – the constant images of children losing their lives, day in, day out.’
No one could fail to be moved by those dreadful images of tiny, broken corpses being pulled from the rubble. Yet, nimble-fingered Gary had been so preoccupied with football on the day all this kicked off seven months before, that he had not found time to tap out a quick line taking issue with the medieval orgy of rape, kidnapping and murder unleashed by Hamas along Israel’s southern border.
Eventually feeling the time had come for a pronouncement, Lineker declared: ‘Now, obviously, we all know October 7 happened, and the Hamas thing. But the minute you raise your voice against what they’re [Israel] now doing there, you get accused of being a supporter of Hamas.’
Unsurprisingly, branding a genocidal attack on Jews – ‘the worst since the Holocaust’ (Sir Keir Starmer) – not to mention a potential catalyst for World War III as ‘the Hamas thing’, met with astonishment. Rewind the clock and let us try to imagine Lineker talking about ‘the 9/11 thing’, ‘the Covid thing’ or, to adopt a footballing analogy, ‘the Hillsborough thing’. It did not help that Lineker also posted a link accusing Israel of genocide and endorsed a call for a boycott of Israeli sport (although he subsequently deleted the latter).
Lineker has an innately cheerful on-screen persona. No matter how badly your team had just done on the pitch, he would somehow succeed in softening the blow
Of course, now that the gag has been removed from his mouth, he may be able to reveal his true opinion.
It is a pity that the confirmation of Lineker’s upcoming departure from our Saturday night screens is dominated by talk of injudicious tweets and bumper pay packets, rather than a grateful crowd begging for more. For in other circumstances we might be concentrating on his prodigious talents as a sportsman with an easygoing fluency in front of the camera.
Lineker has an innately cheerful on-screen persona. No matter how badly your team had just done on the pitch, he would somehow succeed in softening the blow.
We often hear footballers described as ‘role models’. In which regard, there could be few better than Gary Winston Lineker. He is famous for being the highest goal-scorer for three top flight clubs, not to mention England’s top World Cup scorer of all time, while getting through his entire career without receiving a red or yellow card.
As a schoolboy cricketer, he was captain of Leicestershire Schools and was so good at cricket that he might have pursued a career in white trousers rather than shorts. In his book, Behind Closed Doors, he recalls the day he played a charity cricket match in the morning, ending on 112 not out (while facing Courtney Walsh), before scoring three goals for Spurs on the same afternoon. ‘A century and a hat-trick in the same day? Eat that, Roy of the Rovers.’
The eldest of his four sons was critically ill with a form of leukaemia as a baby, an experience which Lineker and his first wife, Michelle, bore with great dignity. He remains close to his boys, to both his ex-wives and to Leicester, the city where his late father, Barry, an ardent admirer of Margaret Thatcher, ran a fruit and veg stall.
Gary would often help out in the market, along with his brother, Wayne, who went on to build a hospitality empire in Spain. For all his credentials as a fluffy liberal whom Jeremy Corbyn once called ‘the best of British’, Gary Lineker would still seem to retain some of those core Thatcherite beliefs, forged in the market forces of a real market.
Indeed, we see occasional flashes of the raging neo-con, judging by his strident defence of footballers’ stratospheric wage levels, his flourishing media business empire and his enthusiasm for investing in complex offshore tax avoidance schemes. His personal wealth is currently estimated in the region of £30 million.
Of course, we hear very little from him on the subject of Mrs Thatcher these days. But she is not the only Conservative for whom he has a soft spot. He happens to share a birthday with another Tory titan, from whom he takes his second name. ‘What a great name. I wish they’d called me that and not Gary,’ he told the Mail in 2020. ‘Gary’s such a crap name and Winston – what about the headlines? It’s got win in it.’