For anyone under the age of 50, Gary Lineker’s name is synonymous with football in this country. A star striker, with an enviable career at club and country level, in the last quarter century he became the face of Premier League punditry.
Now, however, his name has become irrevocably associated with something else.
As the news comes in that Lineker will leave the BBC permanently next weekend – with even the previous agreement for him to lead the broadcaster’s coverage of the 2026 World Cup being cancelled – the reaction from various quarters can already be predicted.
Comment pieces for left-wing national papers will likely describe him as a national treasure, a brave truth-teller who alerted the public to the tragedy of Gaza (as if it hasn’t led every other news bulletin for the last 19 months). His courage will be lauded, but of course – and here the tone will get dark – he crossed those who don’t want you, the public, to know what is happening, and who, it will be implied, exert some level of control over the media (the pieces won’t go into more detail, but the readers may be invited to assume that members of this shadowy lobby have surnames ending with ‘berg’ or ‘stein’.)
The same few hundred activist cranks on the fringes of the Jewish community who sign every anti-Zionist open letter will add their names to another missive deploring Lineker’s departure. Midwit media commentators who book TV gigs largely on the strength of their willingness to vocally criticise Israel will appear on programmes and claim for the thousandth time that Israel is the only country in the world one is not allowed to condemn.
One could probably get decent odds on Lineker himself soon being interviewed for an online outlet such as Mehdi Hasan’s ‘Zeteo’, in which a man with millions of social media followers will likely speak about how he has been ‘silenced’.
The truth, of course, is somewhat more prosaic; Lineker repeatedly made a mockery of the BBC’s vaunted impartiality, while the Corporation engaged in what appeared to be Olympic-level contortionism to try and keep him. He inhabited a magical state of being, in which he was simultaneously merely a humble freelancer yet also the Corporation’s highest paid presenter. The combination of the two meant that the man being paid £1.75 million a year to front one of the BBC’s biggest shows was somehow not subject to the normal editorial guidelines regarding social media use by those presenting flagship programmes.
The football pundit would go on to share a video by Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, an ‘anti-racist’ academic who has repeatedly compared Israel to the Nazis
Perhaps those praising Lineker to the skies are not fully aware of his social media rap sheet. This year alone he had repeatedly shared deeply problematic content. In March he shared an interview with Yisroel Dovid Weiss, a spokesman for the extremist Neturei Karta group, bitterly criticising Israel. If one is looking for moral clarity, I would suggest there are better places to find it than in listening to the man perhaps best known for having led a delegation of fellow useful idiots to a 2006 conference in Tehran called “The Holocaust, Global Vision”. I know it will stun you to hear that this conference was attended by some of the world’s most infamous Holocaust deniers and revisionists.
Not enough for you? Then how about this one – later in March the football pundit would go on to share a video by Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, an ‘anti-racist’ academic who has repeatedly compared Israel to the Nazis.
In this video she nods approvingly in response to a young man saying, “I’m Jewish and I never thought I’d feel the amount of disgust and rage I felt at my own community over the last year and a half, but especially the last few months that amount of pathetic manipulative self-victimisation boggles my mind.”
It’s remarkable how the concept of tokenism appears to completely desert ‘anti-racists’ when it comes to Jewish people.
Gary Lineker sharing a video by an ‘anti-racist’ academic, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu
There were other examples, but what finally pushed the BBC to breaking point, it seems, was the two minute ‘explainer’ video Lineker posted in which a former PLO spokesperson ranted about Zionism, and which featured the image of a rat next to the title.
The Nazis described Jews as rats; it seems that in progressive circles these days it is fashionable to describe the Jewish movement for national self-determination, which the majority of Jews worldwide support, as possessing rodent-like qualities. Even freelancers, according to the Editorial Guidelines, “must not bring the BBC into disrepute”, and it’s somewhat comforting to believe that the BBC determined that a line had been crossed here, mostly because it confirms that such a line actually exists.
Gary Lineker shares as ‘explainer’ video on Zionism, with the image of a rat next to the title
So, what next? Lineker is one of the people behind the successful Goalhanger stable of popular podcasts – The Rest is History, The Rest is Politics, The Rest is Entertainment and so on – and presents one of them himself, called The Rest is Football. Perhaps he may decide to return to Al-Jazeera, the state broadcaster for that well-known human rights haven, Qatar, given he previously trousered £1.6 million from them for years of Champions League coverage.
But from now on, the footballer who famously was never booked in his professional career will be known as the man who received a series of yellow cards from the BBC before the broadcaster, reluctantly but definitively, pulled out a red.
