Gary Lineker has no one to blame but himself for exiting BBC in disgrace

For Gary Lineker, a broadcast career that should have culminated in the supreme cachet of a World Cup final reaches its full stop with, of all things, a rat emoji.

If a week is a long time in politics, it is an aeon in the confounding life of Britain’s highest-profile television presenter, a man who dared consider himself bulletproof, but who has been brought down in a few torrid days by hubris.

Gary Lineker’s long and tumultuous broadcasting career is over.Credit: AP

Across 26 years fronting the BBC’s football coverage, he carved a niche as master of the autocue, always producing some knowingly creaky pun to describe England’s self-sabotage at major tournaments.

In the end, though, the one exit he failed to script was his own.

His mistake was in believing that he could survive any scandal, weather any storm, in the apparent certainty that his BBC employers needed him more than he needed them.

But the moment Lineker shared that fateful Instagram post last week about the Israel-Hamas war, with the symbol of a rat denoting one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the book, the balance of power shifted. This time, there was no parade of celebrity pundits offering solidarity, no selfie against an inscription on the Broadcasting House wall of George Orwell’s message that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Finally, the BBC, weary of their superstar straying into areas far beyond his brief, decided they had heard enough.

It is staggering, even by the standards of a Lineker news cycle, how quickly it has come to this. When I interviewed him in London just 10 days ago, he was still dreaming of signing off with an England triumph in next year’s FIFA World Cup final in New Jersey. Asked if he might launch a diatribe against US President Donald Trump, in the same vein as his 2022, monologue decrying Qatar’s human rights abuses, he smiled: “Yes – if they let me in.”

Gary Lineker celebrates after his former team Leicester City scored in 2023.Credit: Getty Images

He grumbled that budgetary constraints might mean the BBC would only dispatch him to the United States for the knockout stages. Now they will not be sending him at all, instead directing him to the door without any of the star-spangled fanfare he had planned.

For somebody so scrupulous about curating his image, it is devastating; a sorrowful conclusion to more than a quarter of a century as the country’s face of sport.

But the brutal reality is that he should have faced the consequences of his actions much sooner. Nobody else at the corporation would have survived the maelstrom he unleashed in March 2023, when he made a mockery of the BBC’s impartiality rules by comparing Suella Braverman’s small boats crackdown to the “language of 1930s Germany”. The dimensions of that crisis were extraordinary: director-general Tim Davie was forced into meetings in Washington, while a Lineker-less Match of the Day was stripped back to the level of a state broadcast from North Korea. Still he was spared, showing not an ounce of contrition.

On the contrary, he felt vindicated. When we sat down a few weeks later, he told me how, at the height of the turmoil, with camera crews chasing him as he walked the dog, he popped into his local Marks & Spencer and received a standing ovation. I did not quite have the heart to suggest that surely these customers would have been standing up regardless. The comment vividly revealed the gap between Lineker’s self-regard and the public perception of him beyond his liberal enclave in south-west London. Where Lineker viewed himself as the conscience of the nation, even Downing Street branded his political posturing “unacceptable”.

Gary Lineker was stood down from the BBC in 2023 for tweeting criticism of the government’s immigration laws.Credit: Getty Images

Before he fell down the rabbit hole of social media, Lineker enjoyed a golden run as a broadcaster. Despite having learnt at the feet of Des Lynam, he was stilted when he first stepped into the Match of the Day chair in 1999.

“Eh, tell you what, football’s back,” he announced, on his debut appearance, in a nod to his deadpan character. “Any good? Have I got the job?”

Gary Lineker celebrates a goal for England against Paraguay at the World Cup in 1986.Credit: Reuters

But he was conscientious, hiring a voice coach to help bring some light and shade to his delivery. Not even his fiercest detractors could deny he improved immeasurably, becoming such a comforting presence on British screens that he was handed one of the most prized assignments of all, as the BBC’s lead prime-time presenter at the London 2012 Olympics.

Had he only kept to his responsibilities as a sports anchor, Lineker’s reputation today would be very different. If all anyone critiqued was his presenting style, he could have been assured of that seven-figure salary for years to come. Except he craved more, increasingly seeking a relevance outside his field of expertise. The manner of his downfall, where he calculated that he could leap over any obstacle but ended up falling flat on his face, is destined to be a textbook study in the perils of vaulting ambition. Who needs Macbeth, when you can just study the Lineker story?

It would be a mistake to see the rat scandal as an isolated example of his overreach. Lineker has been flying dangerously close to the sun on Gaza ever since the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023. That day, despite many calls for him to condemn the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, his only observation on Twitter was to note that Tottenham Hotspur were top of the league.

His amplifying of pro-Palestinian perspectives has been incessant, sometimes linking to highly inflammatory propaganda. In January last year, he reposted a message on X by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, calling for Israel to be banned from international football. Why did the BBC not act then? After all, he could hardly hide behind the usual defence that his takes on politics were distinct from his day job. This was a profoundly provocative statement with direct relevance to the sport he covered.

Lineker has seemed compelled, during the past 17 months, to keep posting heedlessly about Gaza even when the risks to the BBC’s foundational principle of neutrality were self-evident. There is no other word for this but arrogance.

While his feelings about the Palestinians’s plight are clearly sincere, Lineker inhabits a curious realm where he resists any concerted challenge to his pre-existing world view. As the polemicist Christopher Hitchens once told an American interviewer: “You give me the awful impression that you’ve never read any argument against your position, ever.” The same charge could be levelled at Lineker. He appears not to recognise that the algorithms of Instagram, the platform for much of his Gaza agitation and now the trigger for his demise, are designed to keep showing him only what he wants to see.

Gary Lineker interacts with a fan before an FA Cup quarter-final in 2023.Credit: AP

Ultimately, Lineker was so ubiquitous that his attitudes became indivisible from those of the BBC. The trouble was that these views could be full of logical inconsistencies. One of the most baffling elements of the last interview I conducted with him was how he regarded the conflict in Gaza as simple – “people say it’s a complex issue, but I don’t think it is” – but the controversy of men in women’s sport as impossibly complicated, claiming it was “too nuanced” for him to discuss on his podcast, The Rest Is Football.

Lineker will now have more time than ever to devote to what he calls his “podcast empire”. It is likely to make a fortune that dwarfs even what he has earned at the BBC. But the BBC was the shop window for everything else, the platform for him to gather ratings of which podcasts could only dream. And now, after his Match of the Day farewell on Sunday, it will no longer be his to use. To think, it was only on May 9 that he was basking in the acclaim of the industry, accepting an award for outstanding achievement.

Mark Chapman, one of his Match of the Day successors next season, alongside Kelly Cates and Gabby Logan, said on presenting him with the trophy: “He is so good at his job, it is going to take three people to replace him. What sets this man apart is not just his footballing excellence or his broadcasting prowess but also his unwavering authenticity. He has used his platform to advocate for important causes. That has done two things: one, absolutely drop him in the s---, and the rest of us sometimes; two, show that leadership in football goes far beyond the pitch.”

The first of Chapman’s conclusions was more accurate.

Lineker’s advocacy offers less a template for righteous crusades than an object lesson in why it is better to present rather than preach. Viewers wanted to hear his football stories, not the gospel according to Gary.

As he clasped his award that afternoon, he looked quizzically at his audience and reflected: “This is almost like my death.”

Little could he have foretold how grimly prophetic those words would be.

The Telegraph, London