Sometimes it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for. Gary Lineker, who presented his final Match of the Day last night, has been an endlessly controversial figure over the past ten years. Lineker has hit the headlines with sassy thoughts on everything from asylum seekers to trans rights and Gaza, so it’s easy to forget what a different personality he was as a player.
Lineker back then was all about shy, boyish smiles
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Lineker was a football superstar. He scored 238 goals for his clubs and netted 48 times for England, but away from the pitch he was generally as bland and middle-of-the-road as footballers came. When he was interviewed, he spoke softly and cautiously, avoiding controversy so carefully that it was hard to believe he’d even have an opinion on which day of the week it was, let alone anything remotely political or divisive.
Lineker back then was all about shy, boyish smiles and saying that, while he was quite pleased to score the winner, it didn’t really matter who scored because the important thing was that the team won. He was probably as close to becoming the nation’s sweetheart as any footballer was likely to get in those days.
I was a football writer in the 1990s and I remember going to a press conference for a charity he was endorsing. Naturally, some of the assembled hacks tried to tease the conversation away from the cause and towards more headline-grabbing hullabaloos. But Lineker wouldn’t budge an inch from his brief.
For several years after he retired from the game, he continued to play it safe, becoming a cosy, genial presence behind the polished coffee tables of TV studios. If he were a sandwich, he’d have been cheddar and tomato on brown bread. Actually, hold the tomato – too spicy.
Well, he’s been fairly spicy recently, describing government policies on refugees as “hideously racist”, “immeasurably cruel” and expressed in “language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. He’s also said that transgender people are “some of the most persecuted on the planet”, criticised Jeremy Corbyn and slammed Israel over its response to the October 7 attacks.
When I remember Lineker’s anodyne interviews as a player I have to pinch myself to believe how much he’s changed, but he’s not the only ‘quiet man’ of football to suddenly go all gobby on us.
For most of his career, German star Mesut Ozil was one of the sport’s most introverted players. He preferred to do his talking on the pitch and seemed terrified to even hold eye contact with another member of his species, let alone say ‘boo’ to a goose.
That was until he spoke out about the plight of Uyghurs in China, the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, and began to regularly advocate for the Palestinian cause. He invited the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to his wedding and has recently joined Erdogan’s party.
Matt Le Tissier was fairly quiet away from the pitch as a player, but now the former Southampton midfielder says that Covid patients were ‘actors’ and amplifies conspiracy theories about everything from 9/11 to the Ukraine war. David Icke, who played in goal for Coventry City and Hereford United, emerged from his stunted football career to become a safe-pair-of-hands broadcaster on BBC jewels Newsnight, Breakfast Time and Grandstand. But now he, well, where to even start?
Look, I’ve no beef with Lineker. I agree with some of his views and I disagree with others. But his remark on a recent BBC interview that the ‘mass murder of thousands of children’ in Gaza is ‘probably something we should have a little opinion on’, and that that opinion should be utter revulsion, is inarguable to anyone remotely sensible or decent.
But Lineker’s transformation from a cautious footballer and avuncular broadcaster to a thorn in the side of bullies and the BBC’s biggest headache has been quite the arc. I think he’s still more in tune with the public than his critics realise. It will be fascinating to see what he does – and says – next.
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