Match of the Day (MOTD) presenter Gary Lineker will leave the BBC when his contract expires at the end of this football season, following a rocky road with the broadcaster over his political views.
Lineker will no longer be the face of MOTD after the 2024/25 season but did agree an 18-month extension with the BBC to host the 2026 World Cup in North America.
He hosted the weekly football programme since 1999 and had become the highest-paid employer at the license-funded British broadcaster with a salary of around £1 million a year.
Despite this, Lineker remains hugely popular with the British public owing to his outspoken left-leaning views on British and global politics, including the MENA region.
Earlier this year, Lineker came under fire from right-wing media after sharing a post with his 8.9 million followers calling for the Israeli football team to be suspended from FIFA due to the brutal war on Gaza.
“The Palestinian Football Association calls on [International Olympic Committee], [FIFA] and all regional and int’l sports bodies to take an urgent stance on Israel’s grave violations of human rights and subject it to legal accountability measures,” read the tweet shared by Lineker from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
He deleted the tweet soon after but told journalist Mehdi Hasan a few months later he regularly cries over the situation in Gaza.
“Actually, this issue does not concern me directly. I am not a Muslim. I am not Jewish. I am not Israeli. I am not Palestinian. So, I see, I think purely from the outside as from a neutral perspective and I cannot think of anything that I have seen worse in my lifetime,” he told the journalist.
“The constant images of children losing their lives day in, day out. When I see some images on social media, I cry all the time.”
BBC staff are expected to abide by strict impartiality rules, even outside work hours, with Lineker frequently running into trouble with management over his vocal opinions on human rights issues.
In 2022, he compared the UK government’s migrant bill to Nazi Germany and refused to apologise when he came under fire from government figures, resulting in his suspension from MOTD. He returned to the programme after the BBC said it would review social media rules for staff.
Lineker has also regularly shared articles on Gaza and other human rights issues via his X account, with some hoping his leaving the BBC will mean he can be more vocal on issues close to his heart, such as Palestine.
Others shared clips of interviews with Lineker including one where he said: “It’s not antisemitic to say what Israel is doing is wrong.”
The BBC has come under fire for its coverage of the war on Gaza, with over 100 members of staff recently accusing the broadcaster of bias on the issue.
