Gary Lineker has suggested the BBC wanted him to leave Match of the Day, ahead of his departure next month after more than a quarter of the century at the helm of the show.
In an interview with Amol Rajan for the BBC, Lineker discussed his departure from the football highlights programme, which was announced late last year.
Gabby Logan, Kelly Cates and Mark Chapman will host the show from the 2025-26 season onwards, while Lineker will host the corporation’s coverage of the FA Cup in 2025-26 and the World Cup in 2026.
“It’s time,” he told Rajan. “I’ve done it for a long time, it’s been brilliant.”
Pressed on why he would want to leave, Lineker, 64, said: “Well perhaps they want me to leave … there was a sense of that.
“I think it was their preference that I didn’t do Match of the Day for one more year so they could bring in new people, so it’s slightly unusual that I would do the FA Cup and World Cup but to be honest it’s a scenario that suits me perfectly.”
The former England striker added that the new rights period gave the broadcaster an opportunity to change the programme. He has hosted Match of the Day since 1999.
Lineker has been the BBC’s highest-paid on-air talent for seven consecutive years and was estimated to have made £1.35m in the year 2023-24, according to the corporation’s annual report published in July.
He will continue with the Match of the Day Top 10 podcast and his The Rest is Football podcast, which also features the BBC pundits Alan Shearer and Micah Richards.
In 2023, Lineker was briefly suspended from hosting Match of the Day after a post on X, then known as Twitter, about the government’s asylum policy sparked a row about BBC presenters expressing political views on social media.
He called the then government’s asylum policy “immeasurably cruel” and said a video promoting it used language that was “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.
He told Rajan: “I don’t regret saying [the comments] publicly, because I was right – what I said, it was accurate – so not at all in that sense.
“Would I, in hindsight, do it again? No I wouldn’t, because of all the nonsense that came with it … It was a ridiculous overreaction that was just a reply to someone that was being very rude. And I wasn’t particularly rude back.”
He added: “But I wouldn’t do it again because of all the kerfuffle that followed, and I love the BBC, and I didn’t like the damage that it did to the BBC … But do I regret it and do I think it was the wrong thing to do? No.”
Lineker was also among 500 film, TV and other media professionals that called on the BBC to reinstate its documentary on children and young people living in Gaza, describing it as an “essential piece of journalism”.
The broadcaster removed Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from BBC iPlayer pending a “due diligence” exercise after it emerged that the film’s 14-year-old narrator was the son of a deputy agriculture minister in the territory’s Hamas-run government. Hamas is a proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK.
Lineker told Rajan he would “100%” support the documentary being made available again, adding: “I think you let people make their own minds up. We’re adults. We’re allowed to see things like that. It’s incredibly moving.”
The corporation’s chair, Samir Shah, told MPs last month that “failings” in the making of the documentary were a “dagger to the heart” of the BBC’s claims of trustworthiness and impartiality.