Gary Lineker has shaped the football conversation for 25 years but his controversies got too much for the BBC, writes IAN HERBERT

A chapter of sports broadcasting history began on a Saturday night in early August, 25 years ago, with Gary Lineker’s breezy opening line about his predecessor Des Lynam’s departure.

‘I tell you, football’s back. Any good? Have I got the job?’ That job will be brought to a close at the end of this season, it emerged last night.

There will be less universal national angst about Lineker’s departure from Match of the Day — and from the BBC altogether after a swansong fronting the 2026 World Cup — than when Lynam took his dry humour and the moustache to the ITV, in his defection in the summer of 1999.

Lynam, as comfortable and uncontroversial as an old cardigan, brought frivolity and backchat out of the guests, when they might have preferred to talk about football, and was a national treasure.

Lineker shapes the conversation around football in a way that Lynam did not, yet has become a lightning rod and challenging employee for the BBC in deeply divided times, when tweeting his views on such subjects as immigration and the Middle East.

He has maintained Match of the Day’s popularity in an age of digital clips and instant reaction

However, he is not a national treasure in the way that his predecessor Des Lynam was – and his controversies have become too much for the BBC to keep a handle on

But the 63-year-old, who began on an annual salary of £500,000 which has risen to around £1.35million, has preserved the huge popular appeal of a show against vast odds.

It attracted 5million when he started out, admitting that he felt a little like ‘Mark Bosnich stepping into Peter Schmeichel’s boots at Manchester United’. Yet in a world of live football, ‘content generation’, digital goal clips and egregious dodgy streams, through which criminals thieve from our game, the programme still attracts attracting audiences of 4million on his watch.

Ahead of his opening night, highlights of which included Wimbledon’s win at Watford and Bradford City edging things at Middlesbrough, viewers were offered the reassurance of a contract extension for John Motson. ‘To provide the ailing sports department with a boost.’

One of the early TV reviewers of Lineker’s Match of the Day expressed relief that Alan Hansen was alongside him, ‘with his filleting knife to keep in check any soft focus that might creep in from Lineker.’

But even Lynam knew that the 38-year-old succeeding him brought a level of technical insight that he could never match. One senior executive who worked with them both at that time says: ‘Gary, just like Des, would ask someone why something had happened on the field but the difference was clear. He was asking the question to someone who was not as qualified as he was to answer.’ Lynam once remarked of the man christened ‘Junior Des’: ‘I may be as good a presenter as him, but I can’t remember winning a Golden Ball.’

Lineker’s presenting ability was, by his own admission, rather wooden when he first sought to develop a career in the industry, encouraged by his long-time agent Jon Holmes. But he worked at it, with no expectation that he would simply walk into a role.

He undertook radio work with BBC Leicester. And then there were sessions shadowing the BBC2’s Sport on Friday, presented by the late Helen Rollason in the mid-1990s. When the pre-record was completed, the cameras would remain running with Lineker taking Rollason’s seat and tested on how he could cope with a video tape failure, a guest not turning up, or the show falling ‘off air.’ He also developed auto-cue skills.

Those who worked with Lineker at that time describe a zeal for learning. ‘The message was, “You must do your homework, read the programme notes, read two or three newspapers to develop a range of views,”‘ says the executive. ‘He put the time in on that and when Des Lynam left, he was the automatic choice to go front and centre of our coverage.’

Lineker started presenting Match of the Day back in 1999 and has been a fixture on our screens

In 2016 he presented the show in his underpants after Leicester City won the Premier League

Lineker’s podcasting empire means he will have plenty to get stuck into after leaving 

His outspoken behaviour on social media – particularly about immigration and the Middle East – has pushed the boundaries of the BBC’s policies

He brought that technical football element to the programme when Sky Sports was showing that grown-up discussions about tactics and technique were not necessarily a turn-off. Match of the Day became far more than an extension of the classic Saturday night light entertainment.

Those who tried to replicate what Match of the Day has been delivering since 1964 could not come close. ITV tried in 2001, recruiting Lynam and introducing U2’s Beautiful Day and Andy Townsend in a tactics truck, but it was not the same. The BBC’s head of sport Peter Salmon rightly observed when Match of the Day returned, with Lineker, three years later that it was like ‘welcoming home an old friend’.

That’s not how many have felt about Lineker’s proclivity for expressing his political opinions. The BBC took him off the air in March 2023 after he wrote on X that the language used by the Government to launch a policy on small boat crossings was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.’

It was a measure of his popularity among colleagues that he was reinstated after some of them pulled out of shows in solidarity.

‘I think it is a great shame what happened, because it pretty much pitched me against the BBC and I love the BBC,’ he said of that controversy.

He felt that storm was behind him and had hoped for a new two-year contract taking him beyond this season, with suggestions that he would take an annual £350,000 pay cut, at a time when BBC journalists’ jobs are being shed. But under the Corporation’s new Director of Sport Alex Kay-Jelski, sources have suggested there is a wish for the programme to ‘evolve’ with ‘younger presenters’ and further exploitation of ‘the brand’ to ‘future-proof it.’

The question for a Corporation which has instituted big changes at Football Focus, and seen that programme lose its appeal and relevance, is how it will maintain such a strong viewership. 

Lineker is the last of the signature presenters and it has said everything for the dearth of alternatives that Jermaine Jenas, a cardboard presence despite career opportunities on The One Show, was touted as a successor until his conduct saw him cast out.

He will continue to present coverage of the FA Cup for the 2025-26 season, as well as for the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico 

Quite where the show goes from here and how it will retain its relevance is unclear – Lineker is the last of the signature presenters

One experienced TV sports broadcaster urged the BBC to think twice before changing the formula. ‘If it didn’t exist, you might say you didn’t need it but it’s a design classic,’ said one. ‘It has spine. It knows what it is.’

Lineker will not be short of options. Regardless of other mainstream broadcasting options, the podcasting business operated by Goalhanger, which he co-owns, has enjoyed huge success. 

His The Rest Is Football, which allows him to broadcast untethered by the restrictions of the public service broadcasting, will continue. The Rest Is Politics has just concluded a series of US election podcasts, and The Rest Is History, currently touring the US, where it is one of the biggest podcasts of any genre.

When he took over the Match of the Day job in 1999, Lineker joked that Lynam had not ‘done a Nicolas Anelka and strung it out all summer’ — an allusion to the striker’s move from Arsenal to Real Madrid that year. The BBC have even longer to contemplate their options now, though the complexity of the task of preserving one of our football institutions is greater than ever.