The Golden Boy

‘He concentrates far too much on football,’ a teacher at City of Leicester Boys wrote on Gary Winston Lineker’s last school report card. ‘He’ll never make a living at that.’

Even though he was one of the best football players to have ever played for England, Lineker only became wealthy after retiring by working as a TV host.

Aside from hosting Match of the Day for 26 years, Lineker was known for fronting Walkers crisps commercials, having originally signed a £200,000 contract in 1994.

He is the creator of The Rest Is History series and its spin-offs covering politics, sports, culture, and money, and he has earned additional millions through Goalhanger Podcasts.

However, the 64-year-old has also become notorious in recent years for a string of major controversies over outspoken political comments he has posted on social media.

Now, the latest antisemitism row has resulted in him exiting the BBC sooner than initially expected – and he will not front its coverage of the 2026 World Cup.

The star had moved from footballer to one of the most prominent and highly-paid presenters at the corporation, earning more than £ 1.3 million a year in recent years.

Leicester-born Lineker has been married twice – to Michelle Cockayne from 1986 to 2006, with whom he had four sons; and to Danielle Bux from 2009 to 2016.

He started his footballing career at Leicester City, the club he had supported since childhood, in 1978.

The striker scored 103 goals for the Foxes in all competitions before signing with Everton for £800,000 in 1985.

He scored 40 goals in 57 games for the Toffees in his only season with the Liverpool-based side, before his six goals for England at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico won him the competition’s golden boot award and drew the attention of Spanish football giants Barcelona.

Moving to the Catalan side in 1986, Lineker went on to become the highest scoring British player in La Liga, Spain’s highest football division, under English manager Terry Venables. His record 42 goals was only beaten by Welsh winger Gareth Bale in 2016.

Lineker spent three years in Spain before moving to Tottenham Hotspur in July 1989 for £ 1.1 million.

He played a part in England’s run to the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup in Italy, which resulted in a defeat on penalties against West Germany.

After the match, Lineker, who captained the Lions from 1990 to 1992, famously said: ‘Football is a simple game: 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.’

He won the 1991 FA Cup final with Spurs, beating Nottingham Forest 2-1 despite having a goal controversially disallowed for offside and Forest goalkeeper Mark Crossley saving a penalty.

In 1992, Lineker became the first English footballer to play in Japan’s highest division, the J League, when he joined Nagoya Grampus Eight for £2 million.

He retired after an injury-hit two-year spell at the club, which saw him play just 23 times.

Lineker was famous for never getting a yellow or red card from the referee during his career.

Lineker is England’s fourth record goalscorer with 48 goals in 80 appearances – below only Sir Bobby Charlton (49), Wayne Rooney (53) and Harry Kane (71). 

He is also England’s top scorer in World Cup history, having scored ten goals in two competitions. 

Following his retirement, Lineker joined BBC Radio 5 Live as a football pundit before becoming a team captain on the sports game show They Think It’s All Over from 1995 to 2003.

In 1997, he took over as host of Grandstand when then-presenter Desmond Lynam was at Aintree for the Grand National, which was abandoned due to a bomb alert.

He replaced Lynam as presenter of the BBC’s flagship football highlights programme, Match Of The Day, in 1999, when Lynam defected to rival ITV.

Lineker would later become the corporation’s highest-paid presenter, with the BBC’s annual report for 2023/24 showing his salary to be around £1.35 million a year.

Lineker has frequently voiced support for a liberal approach to border controls and has also voiced support for a second EU referendum.

In March 2023, he compared the language used to launch a government asylum seeker policy with 1930s Germany, describing the scheme as ‘immeasurably cruel’.

After receiving criticism for his remarks, the BBC fired him from anchoring the football highlights show Match of the Day.

After the controversy caused some of his colleagues commentators, including as Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, to boycott the broadcast, Lineker made a comeback.

Later, the BBC implemented new social media guidelines that prohibited flagship broadcasters from disparaging political parties.

Back in 2018, Lineker was criticised by BBC cricket presenter Jonathan Agnew after he posted a series of tweets criticising the Conservative Party.

Agnew told Lineker that as ‘the face of BBC Sport’, he should ‘observe BBC editorial guidelines’.

It came after Lineker tweeted: ‘Imagine how hopeless you’d have to be to still be behind the Tory party in the polls. The absolute state of our politics.’

And in 2022, the BBC found Lineker had breached its impartiality guidelines over comments he had made in February asking then-foreign secretary Liz Truss if her party would ‘hand back their donations from Russian donors’ after the invasion of Ukraine.

That same year, before the World Cup in Qatar, Lineker led criticism of then-foreign secretary James Cleverly for suggesting LGBT+ football fans be ‘respectful of the host nation’ – where homosexuality is illegal.

‘Whatever you do, don’t do anything, Gay. Is that the message?’ Lineker said in response to the cabinet minister’s comments.

Lineker later opened the BBC’s broadcast coverage of the World Cup with a critique of the host country’s treatment of migrant workers and record on human rights.

Another row in August 2022 saw BBC journalist Neil Henderson ask if Lineker had a contract which allowed him to breach BBC impartiality after he tweeted about sewage being pumped into the sea.

The presenter had posted: ‘As a politician, how could you ever, under any circumstances, bring yourself to vote for pumping sewage into our seas? Unfathomable!’

Amid the Gaza War, Lineker was also condemned for allegedly inadvertently retweeting a plea for Israel to be barred from international athletic competitions, including football.

He told the Guardian earlier this year that he has ‘received threats’, and said: ‘If you lean to one side or the other, the levels of attack are extraordinary. How could it be controversial to want peace? I just don’t understand it.

‘You don’t need to be Islamophobic to condemn Hamas or antisemitic to condemn Israel. But at the moment it’s just awful. Awful.’

In November 2024, he announced he would be stepping down from presenting Match Of The Day at the end of the season, but would still host World Cup and FA Cup coverage.

Then, last week, he ‘apologised unreservedly’ for sharing and then deleting an Instagram story from the group Palestine Lobby, illustrated with a picture of a rat, which prompted calls from the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) for him to be sacked.

He said: ‘I would never knowingly share anything antisemitic,’ and added: ‘I take full responsibility for this mistake. That image does not reflect my views. It was an error on my part for which I apologise unreservedly.’

After this, the BBC said Lineker would leave his presenting role following the conclusion of Match Of The Day for the 2024/25 season and added that he would not present its coverage of the 2026 World Cup or next season’s FA Cup.

It is believed that the license agreement for the Goalhanger podcast titles on BBC Sounds, which expires this year, is also being terminated.

In a statement, Lineker said: ‘Football has been at the heart of my life for as long as I can remember – both on the pitch and in the studio.

‘I care deeply about the game, and about the work I’ve done with the BBC over many years. As I’ve said, I would never consciously repost anything antisemitic – it goes against everything I stand for.

‘However, I recognise the error and upset that I caused, and reiterate how sorry I am. Stepping back now feels like the responsible course of action.’

Tim Davie, BBC director-general, added: ‘Gary has acknowledged the mistake he made. Accordingly, we have agreed he will step back from further presenting after this season.

‘Gary has been a defining voice in football coverage for the BBC for over two decades.

‘His passion and knowledge have shaped our sports journalism and earned him the respect of sports fans across the UK and beyond. We want to thank him for the contribution he has made.’

Gabby Logan, Kelly Cates, and Mark Chapman will take Lineker’s position as presenters on Match of the Day starting in the next Premier League season.

Gary, regrettably, is simply another member of the BBC glitterati who is unaware that they lack the competence to remark on topics about which they are ignorant or lack experience, and you can only say ‘I didn’t realise it was antisemitic’ so many times, not again and again. Now let’s hope he keeps his mouth shut and vanishes into unimportance and nowheresville.

However, I don’t believe there’s any possibility of that. Some other channel with snap him up because they will believe that he’s an audience pull, but this is what happens when you overpay people and then they become too powerful within an institution.

He obviously couldn’t help himself, he had to keep pushing until he fell over the line, which makes him extremely foolish indeed.

He is nothing but a champagne socialist, along with all those other champagne socialists that supported him – let’s see how much of a golden handshake he will get from the BBC, and now the Golden Boy has turned out to be Scrap Iron that has rusted. He’s evidently headed the ball once too often!

Of course, we are all entitled to Freedom of Speech, but now Gary has been cancelled, and what have we become as human beings? No, I’m not an activist, I’m just a human being.

But I guess this rubbish will run on and now. He said it, he apologised, and now he’s gone, end of!f