Why Gary Lineker's Match of the Day departure matters

BBC presenter Gary Lineker looks on with the FA Cup trophy

(Image credit: Michael Regan - The FA/The FA via Getty Images)

Gary Lineker, a presenter on the BBC’s Match of the Day football show, is stepping down. That may not sound newsworthy, but actually it means we will have “lost something as a country”, says Tom McTague on UnHerd. Football is more than just entertainment – in this country, it is a “social glue”, a “safe space” where people from all social backgrounds can come together.

Lineker’s departure matters, says McTague, because it signals a change in this national conversation. Lineker has hosted the show for 25 years following a prestigious football career and earned £1.3m last year. His departure represents a handover from the “old era of smart, eloquent and gently amusing commentary” that he inherited from those who went before him, to a new world he has transitioned into himself on social media – one of “hyperpoliticisation and opinion”.

What Gary Lineker's departure means for Match of the Day

Match of the Day will now “sink into obscurity”, leaving us only with rowdier and divisive alternatives. The “purposeless knick-knacks of our national life” matter. This one has gone and we have “lost part of that common land where we could all wander free of politics. It will be hard to find it again”.

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Indeed, it’s “still startling, still incredibly odd” that such bland and amiable figures as TV presenters should now “come with opinions”, says Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. Back in the day we never felt the slightest curiosity about Rustie Lee’s views on the miners’ strike or Gloria Hunniford’s on nuclear weapons. But Lineker is now best known not as a footballer or football commentator but as a political pundit on social media, where he parades fashionable but nonsensical opinions.

He won’t be missed as he retires to “spend more time with his money”, says Roberts, which will keep rolling in thanks to his Goalhanger podcast empire, which broadcasts “inexplicably popular, overheated mid-wit claptrap” and is “going great guns”.

His departure will leave the BBC with options, says Archie Bland in The Guardian. For his salary, you could hire 26 BBC employees on the median salary, or 40 NHS nurses, eight Keir Starmers, or a house somewhere outside Elstree. And all for knowing the names of football teams and asking Alan Shearer whether that red card was justified or not. Nice work if you can get it.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.