Gary Lineker is to leave Match of the Day at the end of the current football season, and to exit the BBC entirely after the 2026 World Cup. It was 1999 when he took over Match from Des Lynam, though in a strange discord with the usual swift passage of time, it feels much longer.
Because despite his close association with it as a player and a pundit Lineker is really nothing much to do with football. His punditry, as we all know, is far wider in its scope than such enjoyable trifles.
Younger readers may find it hard to believe but there was a time when we didn’t know or care what these people thought
It’s still startling, still incredibly odd, that such formerly bland and amiable figures as TV presenters now come with opinions and feel the need to propagate them. Is there to be no escape from politics, anywhere on television, even in the most innocuous sections of the schedule? Can you imagine back in the day tuning in to the BBC’s Pebble Mill at One to find Bob Wellings and Marian Foster gnashing their teeth about Ted Heath? Why do we expect this from presenters now? I never felt the slightest curiosity about Rustie Lee’s views on the miners’ strike, nor did I expect her to volunteer them. Gloria Hunniford’s take on nuclear proliferation remains a mystery to me.
And sports presenters? I never gave a moment’s thought to what Dickie Davies’s opinion might be on the issues of the day. Like Gary Lineker, he was just there to say things like ‘Perhaps a surprising pushback from Wolves in the second half there, Steve?’ and that was about the size of it.
Younger readers may find it hard to believe but there was a time when we didn’t know or care what these people thought. In fact, we still don’t care what they think. The difference is that nowadays they feel the urgent need to tell us.
Lineker is retiring to spend more time with his money. His Goalhanger podcast empire – which consists of the sublime The Rest is History, and a lot of inexplicably popular overheated mid-wit claptrap – is doing great guns.
But can we complain about Lineker’s success here? We get the opinion we pay for. Millions of people want to hear Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart talk endless rot on Goalhanger’s The Rest is Politics, even after their total public humiliation last week. There will always be an audience for comforting tosh, the reflection of inanity to the inane, so good luck to them. The problem only arises when these people set themselves up as experts and are shown to know next to nothing about their subject. Or rather, they have no judgement whatsoever. A sage who sees only what he wants to see, as Rory Stewart admitted to being the other day, is useless. You might just as well consult a ouija board or toss a coin.
And for somebody who loves to wade in to hot topics, Lineker is remarkably silent about some of them. In a glorious moment of synchronicity the news of his abdication broke just hours after he opened the floor on X to questions and totally ignored one asked by Martina Navratilova: ‘I have a question. Do you think males who identify otherwise should be able to play football on women’s teams?’
He will doubtless continue to delight us. Still, at least the public won’t be forced to pay for him. Knowing the BBC they’ll employ as his replacement someone with spurious and fashionable characteristics. Just as identity politics looks to be (maybe, fingers crossed, possibly) beginning its slow ebb tide, the BBC will be permanently stuck at least a decade behind everybody else. The Corporation will be agonising about the optics of their choice, fearful of what a few thousand nutcases with grievances, people who would never dream of tuning in to Match of the Day, might have to say about it.
A drag queen maybe? After all, straight men can’t be allowed to have anything of their own. That sounds ludicrous, but then so does about 90 per cent of everything that’s happened in the last ten years. And that includes an unspectacular ex-footballer being lobbed millions of pounds of public money while ranting like a pub bore about 1930s Germany.
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