Gary Lineker presented Match of the Day for 26 years before he left the BBC in the summer of 2025.
The former England striker had become a regular anchor on other sports coverage on the BBC but Lineker’s home base was the flagship Premier League highlights show.
His forthright political views on social media made Lineker a target online and BBC impartiality rules were thrown at him irrespective of whether he was ever actually in breach of them.
Gary Lineker has become an award-winning podcaster after Match of the Day
An antisemitism row that had nothing to do with football sadly overshadowed his last days at the Match of the Day helm but Lineker’s media career hasn’t sustained any long-term damage.
Indeed, he joked on a recent episode of his podcast that he should have bowed out of the Beeb a decade before he did.
Lineker now fronts The Rest Is Football, a podcast with former Premier League players Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, and has claimed Podcast of the Year and Best TV Presenter awards since leaving MOTD.
The former Tottenham Hotspur and Barcelona centre-forward believes he’d have been picking up trinkets much sooner if he’d taken the plunge earlier.
“Since I quit the BBC, or since I finished with the BBC is probably a better way of describing it, I've won more awards than in my life!” said Lineker on the podcast. “I should have left 10 years ago!”
Lineker, who is ranked at no.6 in FourFourTwo's list of the greatest ever British players to play abroad, started his playing career with home-town club Leicester City before signing for Everton in 1985 and Barcelona a year later.
He spent three seasons at Spurs and ended his days as a Nagoya Grampus player in Japan in 1994. He scored 48 times in 80 senior appearances for England and won the Golden Boot at the World Cup in 1986.
Lineker replaced Des Lynam as the presenter of Match of the Day in 1999 and also presented the BBC’s coverage of golf, the Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games.
Though widely respected as a footballer and broadcaster, Lineker’s became a divisive presence thanks to his willingness to engage directly with political provocateurs and rabble-rousers on social media.
“They should have kicked you off 10 years ago,” laughed Shearer after Lineker’s comment on The Rest Is Football.
Earlier this year, Lineker told FourFourTwo that the BBC can be a difficult place to work for political reasons.
“The BBC is an amazing institution, but it’s also a complex company,” he said. “It’s a challenge at times.
