Match of the Day host Gary Lineker has said that he feels a “sense” that the BBC wanted him to leave the show’s Salford studio after over 25 years in the hot seat.
“Well perhaps they want me to leave … there was a sense of that,” he told Amol Rajan in an interview for the broadcaster.
Lineker, who will not be leaving the BBC entirely despite his departure from the flagship Saturday night football show, added: “I think it was their preference that I didn’t do Match of the Day for one more year so they could bring in new people, so it’s slightly unusual that I would do the FA Cup and World Cup but to be honest it’s a scenario that suits me perfectly.”
The former England centre forward, who has hosted MotD since 1999, has been the BBC’s highest-paid on-air talent for seven consecutive years, pulling in an estimated £1.35m in the year 2023-24 according to the corporation’s last annual report. He added that the new rights period gave the broadcaster an opportunity to change the programme: “In the end, I think there was a feeling that, because it was a new rights period, it was a chance to change the programme,” he said.
He will continue with the Match of the Day Top 10 podcast and his The Rest is Football podcast, which also features the BBC pundits Alan Shearer and Micah Richards.
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In 2023, Lineker was temporarily suspended from Match of the Day after a post on what was then known as Twitter about the government’s asylum policy sparked a row about BBC presenters expressing political views on social media.
He called the then government’s asylum policy “immeasurably cruel” and said a video promoting it used language that was “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.
He told Rajan: “I don’t regret saying [the comments] publicly, because I was right – what I said, it was accurate – so not at all in that sense.
“Would I, in hindsight, do it again? No I wouldn’t, because of all the nonsense that came with it … It was a ridiculous overreaction that was just a reply to someone that was being very rude. And I wasn’t particularly rude back.”
He added: “But I wouldn’t do it again because of all the kerfuffle that followed, and I love the BBC, and I didn’t like the damage that it did to the BBC … But do I regret it and do I think it was the wrong thing to do? No.”
More recently, the outspoken former striker was among 500 film, TV and other media professionals that called on the BBC to reinstate the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, on children and young people living in Gaza, describing it as an “essential piece of journalism”.
The broadcaster removed the doc from iPlayer pending a “due diligence” exercise after it emerged that the film’s 14-year-old narrator was the son of a minister in the territory’s Hamas-run government. Hamas is a proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK.
Lineker said: “I think you let people make their own minds up. We’re adults. We’re allowed to see things like that. It’s incredibly moving.”
The outgoing MotD host added: “The BBC tries to appease the people that hate the BBC… rather than worrying about the people that love the BBC, which is the vast majority because the BBC is a wonderful institution.”
